Edwards on the Christian Life E-Book

Dane Ortlund

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Theologians on the Christian Life
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 382

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Jonathan Edwards is widely hailed as the greatest theologian in American history. In Edwards on the Christian Life, Dane Ortlund invites us to explore the great eighteenth-century pastor's central passion: God's resplendent beauty. Whether reflecting on the nature of love, the preeminence of Scripture, or the glory of the natural world, the concept of beauty stood at the heart of Edwards's theology and permeated his portrait of the Christian life. Clear and engaging, this accessible volume will inspire you to embrace Edwards's magnificent vision of what it means to be a Christian: enjoying and reflecting of the beauty of God in all things. Part of the Theologians on the Christian Life series.

Leseprobe

EDWARDS

on the Christian Life

ALIVE TO THE BEAUTY OF GOD

DANE C. ORTLUND

Foreword by George M. Marsden

Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

Copyright © 2014 by Dane C. Ortlund

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh DennisCover image: Richard Solomon Artists, Mark Summers

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3505-5PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3506-2Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3507-9ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3508-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ortlund, Dane Calvin.

    Edwards on the Christian life : alive to the beauty of God /Dane C. Ortlund; foreword by George M. Marsden.

        1 online resource. — (Theologians on the Christian life)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

    ISBN 978-1-4335-3506-2 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3507-9 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3508-6 ( epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3505-5 (tp)

    1. Edwards, Jonathan, 1703–1758. 2. Christian life.3. Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

BX7260.E3

230'.58092—dc23                    2014014587

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To Granddad

As much as anyone I’ve known, you were—and are much more now—alive to beauty.

CONTENTS

Series PrefaceForeword by George M. MarsdenPrefaceVolumes in The Works of Jonathan Edwards  1  Beauty: The Organizing Theme of Edwards’s Theology of the Christian Life  2  New Birth: The Ignition of the Christian Life  3  Love: The Essence of the Christian Life  4  Joy: The Fuel of the Christian Life  5  Gentleness: The Aroma of the Christian Life  6  Scripture: The Treasure of the Christian Life  7  Prayer: The Communion of the Christian Life  8  Pilgrimage: The Flavor of the Christian Life  9  Obedience: The Fruit of the Christian Life10  Satan: The Enemy of the Christian Life11  The Soul: The Great Concern of the Christian Life12  Heaven: The Hope of the Christian Life13  Four CriticismsConclusionSelect BibliographyGeneral IndexScripture Index

SERIES PREFACE

Some might call us spoiled. We live in an era of significant and substantial resources for Christians on living the Christian life. We have ready access to books, DVD series, online material, seminars—all in the interest of encouraging us in our daily walk with Christ. The laity, the people in the pew, have access to more information than scholars dreamed of having in previous centuries.

Yet for all our abundance of resources, we also lack something. We tend to lack the perspectives from the past, perspectives from a different time and place than our own. To put the matter differently, we have so many riches in our current horizon that we tend not to look to the horizons of the past.

That is unfortunate, especially when it comes to learning about and practicing discipleship. It’s like owning a mansion and choosing to live in only one room. This series invites you to explore the other rooms.

As we go exploring, we will visit places and times different from our own. We will see different models, approaches, and emphases. This series does not intend for these models to be copied uncritically, and it certainly does not intend to put these figures from the past high upon a pedestal like some race of super-Christians. This series intends, however, to help us in the present listen to the past. We believe there is wisdom in the past twenty centuries of the church, wisdom for living the Christian life.

Stephen J. Nichols and Justin Taylor

FOREWORD

Jonathan Edwards has become remarkably popular. In recent decades many thoughtful Christians have been finding his works to be immensely illuminating resources for exploring the depths of the riches of God’s ways. Edwards was not just a theologian, but also a many-sided pastor, preacher, missionary, revivalist, and spiritual guide who was deeply involved in a major Christian awakening.

Books such as Edwards on the Christian Life are especially welcome as part of the current Edwards revival precisely because Edwards is so many-sided and complex. The essence of his theology needs to be distilled from his many writings and to be presented in practical terms for Christians today. Dane Ortlund does just that. Reading Edwards’s own works can inspire Christians today, but often it is best to start with a more accessible introduction, such as the present one.

Edwards wrote with precision and care and is usually eminently clear. Yet, rather than using an economy of words, he often explained things by repetitions that explored all the nuances of the point he was making. He also did not write one systematic work that explains his whole outlook from beginning to end. So even though there are a few of his works, such as his sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light” or his sermon series “Charity and Its Fruits,” that anyone can immediately appreciate, it is helpful to have an overview that presents his outlook in an accessible way. It is all the more valuable that this overview is not just an academic summary but is here used as a guide for the contemporary Christian life.

Dane Ortlund rightly emphasizes that beauty is an overarching and integrating theme in Edwards’s theology of the Christian life. This is in contrast to most of modern evangelical theology, in which beauty is rarely mentioned. One reason for this lack is that evangelicalism has often been shaped by practical emphases and techniques selected on the basis of what seems to work best for particular goals. Beauty typically seems abstract and impractical, something that might be associated with mysticism, contemplation, or perhaps the aestheticism of High Church liturgies and music.

In Edwards, by contrast, beauty is at the center of a practical dynamic. His outlook might be said to be a theology of active beauty. Beauty is first of all a quality radiating from the center of all reality. Edwards connects beauty closely with God’s holiness and with God’s love. At the center of reality are the persons of the Trinity, who perfectly manifest these qualities in the harmony of their mutual love. The creation of the universe is an expression of the overflowing of these dynamics. The highest beauty is perfect love, manifested to us in the sacrificial death of Christ on behalf of the undeserving. Beauty is thus an active power.

If we have eyes to see perfect beauty, it is like a magnet that draws us to it. And if we are drawn into the beauty of that holy love, then we too must respond to it in our loves and actions. Our deepest desires will be to love God and to love what God loves. So a life built around a response to God’s beauty should be characterized by the traits of those who are being drawn into the loving fellowship of the triune God. Dane Ortlund, following Edwards, spells out practical dimensions of what that involves.

George M. Marsden

PREFACE

Thirty years after Jonathan Edwards died, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, predicted that Edwards’s books would soon enjoy “transient notice perhaps scarce above oblivion” and that “when posterity occasionally comes across them in the rubbish of libraries, the rare characters who may read and be pleased with them will be looked upon as singular and whimsical.”1

Ezra who?

To me—and, according to any decent library’s section on Edwards, to many others—it is a small price to pay to be viewed as “singular and whimsical” when reading and enjoying the writings of Jonathan Edwards. The supreme value of reading Edwards—by which I have in mind reading not for the sake of academic cleverness but for the sake of one’s soul—is not historical insight or doctrinal sharpening or moral improvement, though these things happen. The supreme value of reading Edwards is that we are ushered into a universe brimming with beauty. Edwards walks us through the wardrobe into Narnia. We are given glasses—not sunglasses, which dim everything, but their opposite: lenses that brighten everything.

Much has been written on Edwards in recent years. Do we really need another book on the man? And yet, surprisingly little has been said at a nontechnical level that connects his theology of Christian living with the current state of the church. Even if much had been written on his theology of the Christian life, those who have spent time with Edwards will agree that complaining about another Edwards book today is like complaining about another meal today. Regular nourishment doesn’t get old.

The purpose of this book is to reflect on how a Massachusetts pastor three hundred years ago understood the Christian life and, upon this reflection, to be changed, so that we are slightly different people than we would otherwise be. Calmer, gentler, happier. A little brighter, to use Edwards’s favorite metaphor. More beautiful. More human.

We are simply asking, then, under Jonathan Edwards’s tutelage: What does it mean to live as a Christian? What is a Christian?

Edwards’s answer exposes our misconceptions. To live as a Christian at its core is not to adhere to a set of morals, or to assent to right doctrine, or to champion a set of ethical causes, or to passively receive forgiveness of sins, or to attend church or give to the poor or say the right prayer or come from a godly family.

All these have value. But for Edwards, none of them is definitive of Christian living. The Christian life, he says, is to enjoy and reflect the beauty of God. Everything Edwards wrote on Christian living funnels down into this. All the obedience and giving and generosity and kindness and praying and Bible reading in the world, without a heart-sense of divine beauty, is empty. Even damning.

Our strategy will be to ask twelve questions about the Christian life and provide, from Edwards, corresponding answers. These will form the chapters of this book, with a final, thirteenth chapter diagnosing four weaknesses in Edwards’s view of the Christian life. Twelve chapters identify what we can learn from Edwards; one chapter identifies what he could learn from us. In brief the twelve questions and answers are these:

  1.  What is the overarching, integrating theme to Edwards’s theology of the Christian life?

Beauty.

  2.  How is this heart-sense of beauty ignited? How does it all get started? What must happen for anyone to first glimpse the beauty of God?

New birth.

  3.  Having begun, what then is the essence of the Christian life? What does seeing God’s beauty create in us? What’s the heart and soul of Christian living?

Love.

  4.  How does love fuel the Christian life? What’s the nonnegotiable of all nonnegotiables that will keep us loving? What does divine beauty give us?

Joy.

  5.  And what uniquely marks such love and joy? What is the aroma of the Christian life? What in Edwards’s portrait of the Christian life is most lacking in our own world today?

Gentleness.

  6.  Where do I go to get this love, joy, and gentleness? How can I find it? What, concretely, sustains this kind of life through all our ups and downs?

The Bible.

  7.  But as I go to the Bible, what do I do with it as I read? How do I own it, make it mine, turn it into this joy-fueled love?

Prayer.

  8.  What then is the overall flavor of the Christian life? What is the aura, the feel, of following Christ in a world of moral chaos and pain?

Pilgrimage.

  9.  As new birth, Bible, prayer, and all the rest go in, what comes out? What is the fruit of the Christian life?

Obedience.

10.  Who is the great enemy of Christian living? Who wishes above all to prevent loving, joyful, gentle lives?

Satan.

11.  What is the great concern of the Christian life? Toward what, supremely, should our efforts be directed as we walk with God?

The soul.

12.  Finally, what does all this funnel into? When will we be permanently and fully and unfailingly alive to beauty? What, above all else, is the great hope of the Christian life?

Heaven.

So we will learn from Jonathan Edwards about the Christian life.

Some might be skeptical. Understandably so. How does a man who never typed an e-mail or drove a car or swung a golf club or watched a Super Bowl or blogged or tweeted or Skyped help me live my twenty-first-century Christian life? Not much if what matters essentially in Christian living is what we do. A lot if what matters essentially in Christian living is what we are. The way to make a wilting rose bush as healthy as the lush cherry tree next door isn’t to glue cherries onto it but to plant that rose bush in the same rich soil. The point of this book is not mainly to encourage us to imitate Edwards’s life externally. The point is to encourage us all to draw nourishment from the same rich soil of divine beauty that made Edwards’s own life so abundantly fruitful.

“There is a brightness and glory in a Christian life,” preached Jonathan Edwards. There was in his. I want there to be in ours. Edwards helps get us there.

I am grateful to Justin Taylor and Steve Nichols for inviting me to contribute this volume to this strategic series. What dear brothers these two men are. And Thom Notaro’s editing was outstanding.

During the writing of this book I was helped more than words can say in living the Christian life by the Fight Night men at Wheaton College: Erik, Wade, Ian, Tanner, Dave, Ben, Adam, Bobby, and the two Marks. You men make me want to live well. You help me see the beauty of God.

This book is dedicated to my grandfather, Ray Ortlund Sr. (1923–2007), because he was for me a flesh-and-blood incarnation of the radiant beauty to which Edwards summons us. I love you, Gramps, and miss you. What Edwards preached, you were.

Above all, you, Stacey, have been the greatest earthly encouragement to me. (How are you more cheerful than ever after twelve years of living with me?)

What fun it will be to sit with Jonathan Edwards in the new earth some day, just the two of us, and say to him, to God’s glory, “May I tell you how you helped me to live the Christian life? . . .”

_________________

1 Ezra Stiles, Literary Diary, quoted in Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 3. The original reference can be found in Franklin B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D. LL.D., 3 vols. (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 3:275.

VOLUMES IN

THE WORKS OF JONATHAN EDWARDS

All sources abbreviated WJE, followed by volume and page numbers, are from The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Perry Miller, John E. Smith, and Harry S. Stout, 26 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–2008). Individual volumes are as follows:

Vol. 1

Freedom of the Will, edited by Paul Ramsey, 1957.

Vol. 2

Religious Affections, edited by John E. Smith, 1959.

Vol. 3

Original Sin, edited by Clyde A. Holbrook, 1970.

Vol. 4

The Great Awakening, edited by C. C. Goen, 1972.

Vol. 5

Apocalyptic Writings, edited by Stephen J. Stein, 1977.

Vol. 6

Scientific and Philosophical Writings, edited by Wallace E. Anderson, 1980.

Vol. 7

The Life of David Brainerd, edited by Norman Pettit, 1985.

Vol. 8

Ethical Writings, edited by Paul Ramsey, 1989.

Vol. 9

A History of the Work of Redemption, edited by John F. Wilson, 1989.

Vol. 10

Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, edited by Wilson H. Kimnach, 1992.

Vol. 11

Typological Writings, edited by Wallace E. Anderson and Mason I. Lowance Jr., with David Watters, 1993.

Vol. 12

Ecclesiastical Writings, edited by David D. Hall, 1994.

Vol. 13

The “Miscellanies”: Entry nos. a–z, aa–zz, 1–500, edited by Thomas A. Schafer, 1994.

Vol. 14

Sermons and Discourses, 1723–1729, edited by Kenneth P. Minkema, 1997.

Vol. 15

Notes on Scripture, edited by Stephen J. Stein, 1998.

Vol. 16

Letters and Personal Writings, edited by George S. Claghorn, 1998.

Vol. 17

Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733, edited by Mark Valeri, 1999.

Vol. 18

The “Miscellanies”: Entry nos. 501–832, edited by Ava Chamberlain, 2000.

Vol. 19

Sermons and Discourses, 1734–1738, edited by M. X. Lesser, 2001.

Vol. 20

The “Miscellanies”: Entry nos. 833–1152, edited by Amy Plantinga Pauw, 2002.

Vol. 21

Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, edited by Sang Hyun Lee, 2003.

Vol. 22

Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742, edited by Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley, 2003.

Vol. 23

The “Miscellanies”: Entry nos. 1153–1360, edited by Douglas A. Sweeney, 2004.

Vol. 24

The Blank Bible, edited by Stephen J. Stein, 2006.

Vol. 25

Sermons and Discourses, 1743–1758, edited by Wilson H. Kimnach, 2006.

Vol. 26

Catalogues of Books, edited by Peter J. Thuesen, 2008.

CHAPTER 1

BEAUTY

The Organizing Theme of Edwards’s Theology of the Christian Life

To become a Christian is to become alive to beauty. This is the contribution to Christianity that Jonathan Edwards makes and no one has made better.

Augustine gave us a theology of will-transforming grace that liberates the Christian life by replacing our loves. Luther left us the utter settledness of God’s favorable verdict over our morally fickle and despair-prone lives. Calvin gave us the majesty of God over every detail of the Christian’s life. Owen brought us into the joy of loving communion with the triune God. Bunyan left us with hope and courage in battling through the ups and downs of the Christian journey. Bavinck’s legacy is the restorative dimension to divine grace, grace opposed not to nature but only to sin. Spurgeon gave us in unparalleled language the gratuity of the gospel against a backdrop of an utterly sovereign Lord. Lewis expanded our imaginations in seeing the Christian life as a painfully joyous longing to be part of the larger story that makes sense of all things.

And Edwards has given us the beauty of the Christian life—first, the beauty of God, beauty that comes to tangible expression in Christ, and second, the beauty of the Christian, who participates in the triune life of divine love. Divine loveliness, enjoyed and reflected in his creatures: this is Edwards’s legacy.1 Sinners are beautified as they behold the beauty of God in Jesus Christ. That is Edwards’s theology of the Christian life in a single sentence. If Luther was a St. Paul, terse and punchy and emphasizing faith, Edwards was a St. John, calm and elegant and emphasizing love.2

“What an honor must it be,” preached Edwards, “to a creature who is infinitely below God, and less than he, to be beautified and adorned with this beauty, with that beauty which is the highest beauty of God himself, even holiness.”3 This comes from a sermon entitled “God’s Excellencies” and therefore provides a good opportunity to clarify that, for Edwards, God’s “excellency” is another way of speaking of God’s “beauty.”4 Edwards makes this connection earlier in this very sermon when he speaks of “the infinite excellency of Christ” as “delightful, beautiful, and pleasing.”5 We today do not use the word excellency, but we do know what beauty is. So this is the word we will use in an umbrella-like way to capture his vision of Christian living.

Beauty in God

“The key to Jonathan Edwards’ thought,” writes George Marsden, “is that everything is related because everything is related to God.”6 A book on the Christian life in the thought of Jonathan Edwards must begin with God. And the very first thing to be said about the Christian life is that for Edwards, beauty is what makes God God. “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty.”7 Not sovereignty, not wrath, not grace, not omniscience, not eternity, but beauty is what more than anything else defines God’s very divinity. Edwards clearly believed in these other truths about God and saw all of them as upholding and displaying and connected to God’s beauty. Yet none of them expresses who God is in the way that beauty does.

While we normally use the word beauty to speak of what is physically beautiful, Edwards uses beauty as a moral category.8 Not only the eyes but also the soul has an aesthetic capacity. The beauty of God is not captured with a camera but enjoyed with the heart.

This is why, according to Edwards, to speak of God’s holiness is virtually the same thing as to speak of his beauty.9 Edwards refers in one 1730 sermon to God’s “beauteous holiness.”10 Whenever he refers to God’s beauty, a reference to his holiness is often not far behind. Beauty, to Edwards, is fundamentally a moral matter. One might still wonder, however—is not beauty an aesthetic matter, not a moral one? Yet here is the genius of Edwards’s understanding of God and of the Christian life. The moral is the aesthetic. The holy is the beautiful. God does not happen to be beautiful and holy (for Edwards, you cannot have one without the other), but is beautiful in his holiness. This is not a collapsing of categories so as to eradicate all distinction between the moral and the aesthetic; rather it is to understand that supreme loveliness is found only in supreme holiness.

What then is holiness?

The “moral excellency of an intelligent being,” says Edwards in Religious Affections, “when it is true and real, and not only external, or merely seeming and counterfeit, is holiness. Therefore holiness comprehends all the true moral excellency of intelligent beings: there is no other true virtue, but real holiness.”11 Two things are worth noting.

First, Edwards reverts back to the language of excellency, or beauty, in describing holiness. Thus he elsewhere speaks of “the holiness of God, which is his infinite beauty.”12 Holiness is “a flame infinitely pure and bright”13—once more Edwards reverts to the language of sight and heat. Second, he says that holiness “comprehends” all other virtues; “there is no other true virtue” outside holiness. Holiness is not one virtue standing alongside others—love, joy, peace, patience, and all the rest (Gal. 5:22–23). Each of these virtues is itself a particular manifestation of holiness. Edwards believes this is true of Christians (on which more below), but most fundamentally it is true of God. Holiness is the macro-category within which all virtue is subsumed. There is no virtue that is not also, at the same time, holy.

One reason for Edwards’s close association of beauty and holiness is doubtless his own experience. Soon after coming to Northampton, he later recounted, “God has appeared to me, a glorious and lovely being, chiefly on the account of his holiness.”14 That God is holy is what made God beautiful to the young pastor.

Strikingly, Edwards speaks of divine beauty not only in terms of holiness but also in terms of happiness. I call this striking because our instinct even as believers is to set holiness and happiness over against one another. For Edwards, it is both or neither. The two rise and fall together. “Men are apt to drink in strange notions of holiness from our childhood,” he said in a sermon preached at age nineteen, “as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour, unpleasant thing.”15 A dear friend recently e-mailed me and said in blessed honesty, “By far the greatest functional heresy I believe is that holiness is boring and lustful selfishness is fun.”16 If we were to let others peer into how our hearts are really functioning, that statement would ring true for just about all of us as we roll out of bed into another day. And it is a great triumph of the enemy that we would think so. For in truth there is nothing more thrilling, more solid, more exhilarating, more humanity-restoring, more radiantly joyous, than holiness.

In another sermon Edwards sets this as his central doctrine: “It is a thing truly happifying to the soul of men to see God.”17 Note that just as beauty has to do with sight, so Edwards here speaks of the happifying of souls that see God. This is key to Edwards’s whole theology of Christian living: what do we see? Elsewhere in this sermon he refers to the “beatific, happifying sight of God.”18 God’s beauty happifies us. It nestles us into joy. Seeing him—apprehending with the eyes of the heart his lovely holiness—we are changed. Edwards even argues in a sermon on James 1:17 that the reason no one can see God and live is not God’s wrath or justice, but because “God is arrayed with an infinite brightness” that “fills with excess of joy and delight,” so that “the joy and pleasure in beholding would be too strong for a frail nature.”19 According to Edwards, it isn’t God’s terribleness that would incinerate us. It is the joy that would erupt within us that we cannot handle.

One further point should be made about divine beauty: God is the only place true beauty is found. There simply is nowhere else and no one else who has it. All true beauty in the universe is found either in God himself or in the direct reflection of God. “All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being.”20 What a cold underground spring is to a mountain lake, God is to all real beauty in the universe. Edwards uses this very image: God is “the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent.”21

Beauty in Christ

Divine beauty must be given a sharper edge, however. God’s beauty is specifically seen in Jesus Christ. The actual, tangible setting forth of the loveliness of God is manifested in the Son. Christ “is the brightness of God’s glory.” (Here as elsewhere Edwards uses glory and beauty as virtual synonyms.) That is: “He is more excellent than the angels of heaven. He is among them for amiable and divine beauty, as the sun is among the stars. In beholding his beauty, the angels do day and night entertain and feast their souls and in celebrating of it do they continually employ their praises.”22 Edwards goes on to argue that despite the ongoing enjoyment of the angels (“that blessed society”) of Christ’s loveliness, they can never exhaust it, nor their enjoyment of it.

Jonathan Edwards’s vision of the beauty of God is not compatible with other world religions that likewise wish to speak of divine beauty but in a non-Christ-centered and non-Trinitarian way. Edwards is not here focusing on the truth that the incarnate Christ is the beauty of God in flesh and blood, though he certainly affirms that. Rather he is saying that even in his pre-incarnate state, the Son has always been the epitome of divine resplendence.23

In a 1752 sermon Edwards says that it is Christ, supremely in his mercy to sinners, who is the magnetic beauty to which we are drawn. It is a

sight of the divine beauty of Christ, that bows the wills, and draws the hearts of men. A sight of the greatness of God in his attributes, may overwhelm men, and be more than they can endure; but the enmity and opposition of the heart, may remain in its full strength, and the will remain inflexible; whereas, one glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ, shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as it were, by an omnipotent power.24

Not only Christ but the gospel that is revealed in him is an object of exquisite beauty. “Herein primarily consists the glory of the gospel, that it is a holy gospel, and so bright an emanation of the holy beauty of God and Jesus Christ: herein consists the spiritual beauty of its doctrines, that they are holy doctrines.” In his Personal Narrative Edwards again says that “the gospel has seemed to me to be the richest treasure. . . . The way of salvation by Christ, has appeared in a general way, glorious and excellent, and most pleasant and beautiful.”25 The gospel above all else is where God’s beauty is beheld.26

The thinking Edwards gives to the role of sight in the believer’s life is not limited solely to spiritual vision. In one miscellany that considers the glorified body of Christ, Edwards reflects on what believers’ physical eyes will be like in their glorified existence in the new earth. He surmises that believers in the new heavens and the new earth will be able to see across the entire universe since Christ, not the sun, will be lighting the whole universe, and the light emitted by Christ’s glorified body must be far faster than the speed of light in a solar system lit up by our sun.27

Beauty in Nature

Edwards’s radical God-centeredness is seen in the way he speaks of the beauty of the created order. Yet we must understand that according to Edwards it is not, strictly speaking, nature itself that radiates beauty.

On the one hand, the loveliness of creation cannot be denied. Indeed, it is exquisite. “We admire at the beauty of creation, at the beautiful order of it, at the glory of the sun, moon, and stars.”28 As a boy Edwards enjoyed studying the world around him—from the way light worked, to the human eye, to the habits of spiders. Later in life he would often ride his horse out into the countryside, enjoying the world around him.

But the mature Edwards would say that in the deepest sense there is no beauty in nature itself. There is beauty only in God, and all beauty perceived in the creation is simply the reflection of God himself. Picking up the above quote about the “beauty of creation,” Edwards goes on, as he always does, to raise our eyes from the loveliness of creation to the loveliness of God. We have “reason from the beauty of the sun to admire at the invisible glory of that God whose fingers have formed it.”29 Later in this sermon he says, “The beauty of trees, plants, and flowers, with which God has bespangled the face of the earth, is delightful; . . . the beauty of the highest heavens is transcendent; the excellency of angels and the saints in light is very glorious: but it is all deformity and darkness in comparison of the brighter glories and beauties of the Creator of all.”30 The loveliness of the created order exists for God’s sake, not its own.

In one miscellany he makes the fascinating suggestion that just as when we see a radiant countenance on someone’s face, we discern spiritual beauty within, so too when we see beauty in the created order, we discern spiritual beauty in Christ.

When we see beautiful airs of look and gesture, we naturally think the mind that resides within is beautiful. We have all the same, and more, reason to conclude the spiritual beauty of Christ from the beauty of the world; for all the beauties of the universe do as immediately result from the efficiency of Christ, as a cast of an eye or a smile of the countenance depends on the efficiency of the human soul.

In other words, the created order is the radiant face of Christ. This creation-face tells us what Christ is really like.

Beauty in Christians

Divine beauty is not only to be apprehended in God. It is to be reflected in us. It’s why we exist.

The psalmist wrote that those who trust in idols become like them (Pss. 115:8; 135:18). The inverse of this is equally true, that those who trust in the true God become like him. “The light of the Sun of Righteousness don’t [sic] only shine upon them,” says Edwards of Christians, “but is so communicated to them that they shine also, and become little images of that Sun which shines upon them.”31 As George Herbert wrote a century before Edwards, in the poem “The Forerunners,”

True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame

     But borrow’d thence to light us thither.32

Divine beauty is, in its own finite way, to be reproduced. The supreme instance of divine beauty being reflected in creation is not in the sun or the Grand Canyon or a nightingale’s song, but in a Christian. This is why Psalm 8 compares the glory of a human being to the glory of the galaxy (Ps. 8:3, 5). A Christian is a mini-advertisement for divine beauty. To be a Christian is to be a little, frail, finite, morally faltering picture of the beauty of God. When Edwards speaks of participating in and reflecting God’s own excellency, holiness, happiness, or good, he is getting at the same reality from different angles. He is talking about God’s beauty. Consider the following, from an undated sermon:

God is with his people as they have fellowship and communion with God and as they are partakers with God in his good, possessing infinite good, and those are partakers with him in the same excellency and happiness. God communicates himself to his people. He imparts of his own beauty. They are said to be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). They are partakers of God’s holiness (Heb 12:10).

So God communicates to his people of his own happiness. They are partakers of that infinite fountain of joy and blessedness by which he himself is happy. God is infinitely happy in himself, and he gives his people to be happy in him. . . .

That grace and holiness, that divine light and love, and that peace and joy that is in the hearts of the saints is a communication from God. Those are streams, or rather drops, from the infinite fountain of God’s holiness and blessedness. ’Tis a ray from the fountain of light.33

Right at the heart of what Edwards contributes to historic Christianity is his insistence that Christian living is not mere mental assent, or association with a particular church, or scrupulous behavior monitoring, or anything else that is able to remain relatively external to the believer. Christian living is participation in God, in “the supreme loveliness of his nature.”34 And if what defines God supremely is his beauty or loveliness or excellency, then to participate in the triune life of God is to be swept up into, and to exude, that heavenly resplendence. A Christian is one who is being beautified. This is because Christian living is fundamentally participation in the unceasing explosion of delighted intratrinitarian joy and love.

Consider a Sunday morning. You and your wife (or husband, or roommate, or whoever) have been arguing all weekend. Your heart feels dead. As you grouchily slide into the pew, all you want is for no one to speak to you, and all you can think of is the relational strife in which you are embroiled, and perhaps what you plan to have for lunch. In due course the pastor stands up, someone you deem a very unimpressive man. Maybe you’re right. He begins to speak of the heart of God for sinners from the opening verses of Ephesians 2, or maybe Titus 3, or Romans 5, or one of the psalms, or just about anywhere else in the Bible. Though you couldn’t have manufactured it in a self-generated way, you feel your heart relaxing just a bit. The hardening melts. You begin to see your own contribution to the weekend strife. You mourn over your silliness. Soon you are in quiet repentance. Before long, without engineering it on your own, you find your heart—just a little bit, and with much distraction—drawn out to Christ. You’re pulled toward him.

Here is how Jonathan Edwards would articulate your experience: you have just been taken up into the Trinity.35

Not metaphorically, but truly.36 You have been swept up into the communal love and adoration that stretches back into time immemorial and the overflow of which caused the very universe to be brought into existence—so that you, on a bland Sunday morning, as a sinner, could participate in the joy of the triune God, Father delighting in Son, Son adoring Father, with the Holy Spirit being himself the very bond of love into which you are swept up. This is why the world exists. And though you will not take on new physical features when you leave church that morning, you will have been beautified, and the perceptive onlooker will note the difference in your countenance (Ps. 34:5)—a change which is a glimpse of the final state of paradise in the new heavens and the new earth.

For Edwards, this human reflection of divine beauty is particularly crucial for pastors, those given to lead and shepherd God’s people. “We see in natural bodies,” preached Edwards in 1744, “that when heat is raised in them to a high degree, at length they begin to shine. And a principle of true grace in the soul is like an inward heat, a holy ardor of a heavenly fire kindled in the soul.” He then makes his intended application:

This in ministers of the gospel ought to be to that degree, as to shine forth brightly in all their conversation; and there should as it were be a light about them wherever they go, exhibiting to all that behold them, the amiable, delightful image of the beauty and brightness of their glorious Master.37

A pastor, above all, is to provide for people a glimpse of the radiant loveliness of Christ. All their preaching, discipling, counseling, and administrating are channels through which divine luminosity is beheld. The fundamental calling of leaders of God’s people is not only to be under-shepherds of the chief Shepherd but also under-beautifiers of the chief Beautifier.

Beauty in Edwards’s Literary Efforts

It is not only the content of Edwards’s theology that is beautiful, but also the way in which he expresses himself that is beautiful.

When lifting up the delights of love, for example, in Christian living, he does so with writing that is itself lovely. How he communicates is fitting to what he is communicating. Consider this:

He who has divine love in him has a wellspring of true happiness that he carries about in his own breast, a fountain of sweetness, a spring of the water of life. There is a pleasant calmness and serenity and brightness in the soul that accompanies the exercises of this holy affection.38

God in Christ allows such little, poor creatures as you are to come to him, to love communion with him, and to maintain a communication of love with him. You may go to God and tell him how you love him and open your heart and he will accept of it. . . . He is come down from heaven and has taken upon him the human nature in purpose, that he might be near to you and might be, as it were, your companion.39

Or this, from a letter to a woman whose only son had just died—a letter written in 1751, just after his own life had gone into meltdown with the ugly cutting short of his ministry in Northampton:

We see then, dear Madam, how rich and how adequate is the provision, which God has made for our consolation, in all our afflictions, in giving us a Redeemer of such glory and such love, especially, when it is considered, what were the ends of this great manifestation of beauty and love in his death.

He suffered that we might be delivered. His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death, to take away the sting of sorrow, and to impart everlasting consolation. He was oppressed and afflicted, that we might be supported. He was overwhelmed in the darkness of death, that we might have the light of life. He was cast into the furnace of God’s wrath, that we might drink of the rivers of his pleasures. His soul was overwhelmed with a flood of sorrow, that our hearts might be overwhelmed with a flood of eternal joy.

Death may deprive us of our friends here, but it cannot deprive us of our best Friend. . . . Therefore, in this we may be confident, though the earth be removed, in him we shall triumph with everlasting joy. Now, when storms and tempests arise, we may resort to him, who is a hiding-place from the storm, and a covert from the tempest. When we thirst, we may come to him, who is as rivers of water in a dry place. When we are weary, we may go to him, who is as a shadow of a great rock in a weary land.40

Beauty colors not only what Edwards says but how he says it. My point in reproducing these excerpts is to prevent anyone from getting to know Edwards mainly by reading published dissertations on him and concluding that the degree of elegance with which scholars expound Edwards’s thought indicates the degree of elegance in Edwards’s own writing. If all we know of Van Gogh is what we read in art history books without ever actually viewing a Van Gogh painting, we will have an impoverished appreciation of this great artist. We must go to the artistry itself.

Beauty in Edwards’s Life

Finally, not only do his content and how he conveys it radiate beauty; so too does Edwards’s own life. Surely it need not be said that Edwards was not perfect? I certainly would not want to convey a notion of a flawless man, and the final chapter of this book will reflect on some weaknesses in Edwards’s legacy concerning the Christian life. But we are under biblical orders to consider the lives of those who have spoken the word of God to us and to imitate their faith (Heb. 13:7).

It is in that spirit that we would be wise to consider who Edwards himself was as a man. What would a conversation with him at Starbucks have been like? I contend that beauty colors not only his theology of the Christian life but also his own Christian life itself. When Edwards wrote of the sweetness of communing with the infinitely beautiful Savior, he was speaking not as a detached theoretician but out of the fullness of his own soul. This was the knowledge, to use his own image, not of one who knows what honey consists of chemically but of one who has tasted.41 Edwards was himself a beautiful man, for he himself had had the blinds of his sinfulness pulled aside to behold the flooding sunbeams of divine beauty. “Edwards’ religion was from its root,” writes one modern theologian, “a sheer beholding of God’s beauty.”42 Time with him would itself have been beautifying.

By all this I don’t mean we would have shared many laughs and chitchat over that cup of coffee. He was a rather somber character, from what we can gather. But is joy really measured by such things anyway? In chapter 4 we’ll discuss the solemnity of true joy. Some of our most miserable moments are laugh-filled and some of our most joyful are tear-filled. Edwards would not be entertaining to sit down with. But we would leave with just a bit more solidity and calm beauty.

Perhaps the most persuasive evidence of the beauty of Edwards’s life is the way others spoke of him. One thinks, for example, of how he is described by his own family. When he died in March 1758, his wife, Sarah, wrote to their daughter Lucy:

My very dear Child,

What shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a very dark cloud. O that we may kiss the rod, and lay our hands on our mouths! The Lord has done it. He has made me adore his goodness, that we had him so long. But my God lives; and he has my heart. O what a legacy my husband, and your father, has left us! We are all given to God; and there I am, and love to be.

Your ever affectionate mother, Sarah Edwards43

Even more revealing are the ways his children spoke of him. On April 3, 1758, another daughter, Susannah, wrote to her older sister Esther and reflected on her father’s final sermon three months earlier there in Stockbridge before he left to take up the presidency at Princeton (then College of New Jersey). Her admiration comes through clearly.

My father took leave of all his people and family as affectionately as if he knew he should not come again. On the Sabbath afternoon he preached from these words, “We have no continuing city, therefore let us seek one to come.” The chapter that he read was Acts the 20th. O, how proper. What could he have done more?44