Preaching For Revival: Jonathan Edwards. Stuart Piggin, Macquarie University

Transcription

1 Preaching For Revival: Jonathan Edwards Stuart Piggin, Macquarie University Introduction NSW & ACT Baptist Ministers Association Conference Refresh 2007 Vision Valley, Arcadia 27 June 2007 Jonathan Edwards ( ), was the last of the Puritans and the first of the Evangelicals, America s greatest philosopher theologian, and the human harbinger of the Great Awakening. In this conference you are committed to learning from those past Christian leaders from whom you have inherited your faith and ministry. The prodigious achievement of Jonathan Edwards, intellectually and spiritually, has been barely noticed in Australia, but I suspect his impact on us has been enormous because of his formative shaping of the evangelical and modern missionary movements. It would be a great thing for the preachers of Australia to wake up to the great awakener, to become conscious of him who has shaped us so much unconsciously. You may have read Martin Lloyd-Jones s amazing testimony to Jonathan Edwards: I am tempted... to compare the Puritans to the Alps, Luther and Calvin to the Himalayas, and Jonathan Edwards to Mount Everest! He has always seemed to me to be the man most like the apostle Paul. 1 Both Edwards and Lloyd-Jones spent their lives preaching for revival, by which I mean preaching to awaken people to reality, the reality about God and about themselves. And both Edwards and Lloyd-Jones had the joy of witnessing revival through their preaching. Edwards first experienced revival in his own congregation at Northampton Massachusetts in 1734/5, and on this he wrote his Narrative of a Surprising Work of God 2, which contains the classic description of evangelical revival. Then he was involved in the Great Awakening which blew the lid of New England in the years The Puritans, p Edwards, Jonathan, The Great Awakening, edited by C. C. Goen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol.4, Yale University Press, New Haven,

2 As for Martin Lloyd-Jones, during the Great Depression, revival came to the first church to which he was appointed, in Aberavon, Wales. This was a revival which saw the conversion of the local Communist Union leader and which seems to have saved the disaffected coal miners of the region from going over to Communism. True revivals always have community impact; their influence overflows into the surrounding community, a purifying flood. At the end of his splendid biography of Martin Lloyd-Jones, Ian Murray, in commenting on his subject s life-long yearning for revival, makes this observation: He was a preacher. He believed in preaching which was unadorned... but alive, a union of truth and fire... His prayer for revival was accordingly associated with the profound conviction that every great movement of the Spirit will be found to be bound up with the giving of men who preach with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. 3 As Baptist pastors, you are professional preachers. Your lives will be made up of preparing and preaching sermons. I want tonight to persuade you in all the phases of your ministry to preach for revival. To encourage you to be intentional about that, I will try to tell you what that entailed in each phase of Edwards s life. To do this I want to divide his preaching career into six phases. These phases correspond to the periods covered by the six volumes of Edwards s sermons published between 1992 and 2007 in the Yale edition of Edwards works, now numbering 25 volumes in all. 1. The Spiritual Formation Phase (1720 to 1723) The first Yale volume of Edwards s sermons, edited by Wilson Kimnach, the greatest authority on Edwards s homiletics, includes the sermons he preached in his first pastorate in New York from August 1722, when he was just 19 years of age 4, to April It was a happy time for him. It was during this appointment that Edwards wrote his Resolutions and Diary (found in vol.16 of the Yale edition) so that, with fascination, we are able to track from a range of sources the development of his soul as well as the evolution of his mind. So we know a lot about what we might label today his spiritual formation. And we can also see the first honing of his chief professional instrument the artistry of preaching. Already the incantatory intensity with which he pursued the truth, or better, the reality of God, is evident in these early He was born on 5 October

3 explorations of the preacher art. Already we see that he understood that the purpose of preaching was not so much to teach people the truth about God, but to awaken people to see the reality of God. Revival is when people see Reality, which is the world as it is perceived by God. It is when they see themselves and their world and the Lord himself from God s perspective. And already we detect in these early sermons the fusion of the affectional and the rational, of heart and head. Here, in love with the love of God, we find him keener to lure people into heaven than to frighten them out of hell. Edwards s early spirituality was fanned by the fires of love, not the fires of hell. One of the reasons why Edwards was so happy in this first pastorate and so in love with the love of God was that he had fallen in love. In 1723, when he was twenty years of age, he fell in love with Sarah Pierpont, aged 13. He was engaged to her when she was 15 and married to her when she was 17. Their marriage was a big success, and with this woman of 'uncommon purity', Jonathan enjoyed as he said on his deathbed, an 'uncommon union which, he trusted, was spiritual. 5 She, too, was an integral part of his spiritual formation. So it was that in 1723 at the age of 20, Jonathan wrote his short apostrophe or tribute to Sarah, aged only 13. It has become in America the second bestknown thing he ever wrote, after Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. It begins: They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved by that Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisibly comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him. That she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven, being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight forever. 6 Now the language is restrained, even impersonal, since it is in the third person:... there is a young lady... that Great Being. But the vocabulary gives the game away: exceeding sweet delight and ravished show that for Edwards s understanding of God s agape love was very close to eros. 5 Jonathan Edwards, The Great Awakening, edited by C. C. Goen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol.4, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972): Sermons and Discourses , ed. Kimnach, p

4 Now let me make three points about this. First, unlike most evangelicals who have followed since, Edwards was a thoroughgoing typologist. Everything in nature and in history was a type of something higher and more spiritual. That sexual love is an anticipation or type of divine love was an early conviction of Edwards, coinciding with his falling in love with Sarah. And just two years later in 1725, very close to the precise date of their engagement, 7 he wrote: How greatly are we inclined to the other sex! Nor doth an exalted and fervent love to God hinder this, but only refines and purifies it. God has created the human nature to love fellow creatures, which he wisely has principally turned to the other sex. Christ has an human nature as well as we, and has an inclination to love those that partake of the human [nature] as well as we. That inclination which in us is turned to the other sex, in him is turned to the church, which is his spouse... Therefore when we feel love to anyone of the other sex, 'tis a good way to think of the love of Christ to an holy and beautiful soul. 8 Just as sexual attraction is a type of Christ s love for his church, so, for Edwards, marriage is a type of heaven. He believed that heaven is a world of love and that marriage is an anticipation of it. His was a marriage which reflected his belief that God is a tender, personal God, and that therefore he should be a tender lover. That is my first point, that Edwards found typological meaning in every experience. Second, Edwards identified true religion with the affections. True religion, he declared famously, consists so much in the affections that there can be no true religion without them. 9 Now, by affections he meant, not so much emotions, which change all the time, but our ruling inclinations, abiding passions, what we love most, which are more constant and do not change. One of his great insights into reality is the psychological fact that we are, or we become, what we love most, what we are most passionate about. Edwards was careful, however, to distinguish between the natural affections and divine affections. Natural love between the sexes is essential for the good ordering of the natural world, but that does not make it a divine love. But Jonathan himself, as we have seen, judged his union with Sarah to be more than this. It was uncommon. It was spiritual. Their relationship would survive their deaths. They would see each other in eternity, in heaven which is a world of love. So, what I am suggesting is that the experience of falling in 7 Jonathan Edwards, The 'Miscellanies' (entry Nos a-z, aa-zz, and 1-500), ed. by Thomas Schafer, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): The 'Miscellanies, ed. Schafer, p.331f. 9 Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol.2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959):

5 love with Sarah did make Jonathan, whose intellect was massive, question the omnipotence of the reason, and warm to the supremacy of the heart, and it just may be that this was a critical step in the evolution of evangelical religion. Warm-hearted evangelical religion is not necessarily the product of the love affair between a man and a woman, that is, not necessary theoretically or theologically, but historically and actually, this may have been a factor. We know from his 1742 work, Thoughts concerning the present Revival of Religion in New-England, where Sarah is his greatest model of revived spirituality, that she may have influenced Jonathan to accept the validity, not only of religious experience, but of ecstatic religious experience, a critical step in the evolution of revivalistic evangelical religion. Are you nervous of any spiritual experiences? Then how will you be able to understand, let alone use for the greater glory of God, any spiritual movements characterised by ecstatic experiences, that is experiences where you are enabled to stand outside yourself and see for yourself the reality that the habitual you is not the ideal you? Kimach: The New York period was, by his own account, the time of Edwards greatest religious intensity. He might subsequently have become more learned, wiser, and deeper, but he was never again to have such inward burnings in his own heart. 10 You cannot hope to preach for revival unless you have experienced the inward burnings, for revival preaching, by definition, is anointed preaching. Interestingly, importantly, the inward burnings had nothing to do with the fires of hell. Edwards may be the most celebrated hell-fire preacher in Protestant Christianity because of his most famous sermon, Sinners in the hands of any angry God. But, although he does address the need to keep out of hell in these early sermons, he does not know what he is talking about from experience. He speaks of hell in this first phase of his ministry because it was conventional for Puritans to speak of it. For his own part he even at this stage doubted his own conversion because it was unaccompanied by terror. 11 Revival preaching does not come from hell; it comes from heaven. It comes from an experience of heaven s love, which is another definition of revival, by the way revival is a visitation from on high (Isaiah 32.15; Luke 1.78). The authentic prayer for revival is Come down, Lord. Come down from where your glory fills the heavens and let your glory fill the earth. 12 But my third point is the most important, even if it is more mundane, and it is one of the themes of this lecture. It just so happened that in this phase of his 10 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Kimnach, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Kimnach, Firestorm, 13. 5

6 life, as we have seen, Edwards was overwhelmed, not only by the love of God, but also by his love for Sarah. This was a great reality in his life. Whatever was the main reality in his life, he made to serve the purpose of glorifying God. He did this by putting it, whatever it was, to the unifying of his head and his heart in the pursuit of revived Christianity. In later phases other realities, few as pleasant as this, overtook his life, as they do for all of us: hours at the desk studying, hours up at night looking after his 11 children, the agony of preaching at the funeral of one of them, Jerusha; coping with the earthquake of revival itself, the struggles of pastoral ministry, culminating in his expulsion from Northampton, and for a surprisingly long period of his life, the experience of war between his fellow colonials and the French and the Indians which was far too close for comfort and which made him reflect on the minister as warrior. He saw all these circumstances of life in terms of their divine purpose, which was to revive the church to make it the great instrument in the fulfilment of God s plan of redemption in the world. None of these factors theoretically are necessary to the evolution of warm-hearted evangelical faith, but he made them all serve the greater glory of God, by factoring them all into his life-long labour to revive God s church. You get the point, whatever the circumstances of your life, dedicate them all to your great calling to awaken your hearers to the reality of God. Listen carefully to how Wilson Kimnach summarises Edwards own selfunderstanding at this stage in his ministry, and reflect on how you should make this your own understanding of your own calling, for I am convinced that unless the ministers of the Gospel understand their role in a way such as this, we will never have the power to awaken Australians to the reality of God in Christ: In New York... he was confronted with the task of becoming a professional in the highest sense: of integrating personal yearnings, quantities of old and new theology, a family ministerial tradition, and the new practical demands of the moment in a way of life which would, in the Puritan tradition he was heir to, demonstrate the value of the sacred in a secular world. That [his] Diary gives so much evidence of struggle and intense self-examination is hardly an indication of morbidity or neurosis, as has sometimes been suggested, but rather testifies to Edwards unusually realistic grasp of his challenging situation in the light of his high ambition. 13 In Sydney... you are confronted with the task of becoming a professional in the highest sense: of integrating personal yearnings your need for recognition and success and love in a role which demands self-forgetfulness and humility; the apparently contradictory aims of old 13 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Kimnach,

7 and new theology, the need to show that you can be more conservative than the Jensens and more applied than the Houstons; a family tradition of those who had ministers before you or who made a success of their businesses, and the new practical demands of the moment in a way of life which would, in the Baptist tradition you are heir to, demonstrate the value of the gospel in this secular, materialistic, pragmatic world, longing for leadership and idealism. That you give so much evidence of having struggled to reconcile all these things while growing in holiness at the same time is hardly an indication of self-obsession or neurosis, as is stereotypically thought, but rather testifies to your undoubtedly realistic grasp of the challenging situation of being a Baptist pastor in the light of the desperate need of this nation for authentic Christianity. What does this formation of the revival preacher entail in practice? You must know your Bible and get your theology straight. You must excel in that. But you must let them catch on fire in your imagination so that you can set your own people and community on fire. Edwards visions at this time were of doctrines how can you see a doctrine? Edwards saw Jesus as mediator between God and Man. He did not see his face he saw him reconciling the world to God. He saw God s sovereignty. He saw God s holiness. In the sermon on holiness which he preached in this period, he presented holiness as a carefully defined abstract and a priori concept, but he also presented it as an experience. An experienced idea. 14 Your sermons must present ideas or your people will be ignorant and bored. They must be experienced ideas or your people will be interested, well-taught, but unawakened. The content of revival sermons is the experienced idea this makes the life of God more concrete, more real, more richly personal. So by the end of his first stage in his development as a preacher, he was beginning to learn its artistry. It should be the plain, unadorned truth, but it should also be an aesthetic creation, calculated (or better, designed) to make concrete the experience of God in your hearers. It has to come from the inward burnings. It is the singing forth of the meditations of your heart in prose. Sermons which evoke revival are prose poetry The Intellectual Development Phase ( ) The second volume of sermons, edited by Kenneth Minkema, Executive Director of the Yale edition of Edwards s works and an authority on Edwards s family life, includes a selection of the sermons which Edwards preached between 1723 and This covers his second pastorate at Bolton, his appointment as tutor at Yale until the end of 1726, and then his 14 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Kimnach, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Kimnach,

8 appointment as assistant minister to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at Northampton, Massachusetts. The most important characteristic of this period was that it was a time of prodigious intellectual growth: he forged his Calvinistic system, at once orthodox and unique, and engaged with the thought, especially the new science, of his day. There can be no doubt that the power of his preaching was grounded in his confidence in the theology of the message: If you believe in the absolute sovereignty of God then it must mean that we can do absolutely nothing to save ourselves, that our salvation comes from Christ alone. Therefore Edwards preaching dwelt on our insufficiency and Christ s sufficiency, our own inadequacy and Christ s excellency. Again it is preaching which comes from viewing things from God s perspective. As he wrote for an oration he gave at Yale in 1723 for his MA graduation: We maintain that Christ is our complete Saviour and not merely the partial author of our eternal salvation... [Since every sin is an infinite affront to God s justice and honour, even] the greatest and most sincere repentance of which human nature is capable undoubtedly bears no proportion to the slightest wrong done to God. 16 Does such theological rigour strangle the warmth of heart-felt faith? Well, it can. It often has. If all it does is produce scholasticism, it will not produce revival. I know of no scholastic theologian who has been used of God to bring about revival. It is therefore fascinating that in this same period as he honed his intellectual skills and sharpened his Calvinistic theology, he simultaneously developed his views on the pleasures of the Christian life, an emphasis which has led his modern-day interpreter, John Piper, to speak of spiritual hedonism. He preached more than once in this period a sermon entitled The Pleasantness of Religion. 17 It is based on the text Proverbs : My son, [you eat] honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: so shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul... The doctrine or thesis or argument of this sermon is that being religious is worth it for the sake of the pleasure of it alone. Typically, he defends this thesis with five subsidiary arguments: First, the religious man gets just as much pleasure from the gratification of his five senses as the sensual man, and indeed more because he does not glut his senses which only leads to revulsion. 16 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Minkema, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Minkema,

9 Second, religion sweetens temporal delights and pleasures, because they are indulged with a good conscience, in peace, at the right time. Third, the joys of illegitimate pleasures are short-lived and quickly overtaken by sorrow which leaves the wicked worse off than before. Fourth, the sorrows accompanying any godly practices are short-lived and quickly overtaken by the delights which they inevitably promote. Sorrow for sin leading to repentance increases our pleasure. Fifth, pleasures of the soul, which the godly can experience, are far better than those of the body, to which the ungodly are limited. Typically, again, when he came to this fifth argument, he listed nine pleasures of the soul which the ungodly cannot enjoy; the seventh of these referred to beholding the beauty and enjoying the love of Christ; the eighth to the joys of Christian fellowship, brotherly kindness; the ninth to hope, namely the prospect of the resurrection and the enjoyment of Christ forever. Once you have grasped those strong truths, the trick is to allow them to grasp you, so that when you preach on them you can make them concrete, real in this life. So that, while the ninth pleasures of the converted soul refers to the after life, it is the hope of them in this life which makes them a reality now, and it is revival which awakens us to this reality. Typically, yet again, Edwards takes some of these thoughts and develops them in subsequent sermons, in this case pushing us further into spiritual hedonism. In a sermon preached in 1729 at the end of this period, namely Spiritual appetites need no bounds, based on Song of Songs 5.1 Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved, Edwards argues that whereas temporal pleasures do have the capacity to cloy if over-indulged, our spiritual or gracious appetites cannot be over-indulged. By encouraging his hearers to swim in the rivers of spiritual pleasure, he was unleashing the flood-tide of revival. You can just feel that the Great Awakening is not light years away. 3. The Professional Growth as a Pastor Phase ( ) If the first volume of Edwards s sermons is particularly revealing of his spiritual growth, and the second, his intellectual growth, the third, covering the period , shows his professional growth as a pastor. It was a time of domestic stability and pastoral engagement for him. He did not travel in this period, his first two daughters were born, and he got to know the anxieties and foibles of his people. Edwards s sermons now developed out of the rhythms of pastoral care, from his sustained engagement with the pressing social, economic and political concerns of his congregation. These 9

10 issues gave to the evangelical doctrines, such as original sin, their weight and relevance. Political conflict and uneven economic growth, making some wealthy and others to struggle, made Edwards see that only spiritual regeneration and the consequent moral reformation could save his people, either collectively as a society or individually as eternal souls. His response was a more evangelical one than moralism or legalism. In the sermon God glorified in Man s Dependence Edwards contends that the collective, sinful response of his community to political and economic challenges, revealed a pervasive corruption which could only be addressed by a Trinitarian God. The lack of vital religion, evidenced by those sidetracked by political ambition and economic avarice, angered God and created an urgent need for revival. At the end of this period, he preached a gem, the first of his truly classic sermons. A Divine and Supernatural Light is a brilliant synthesis of his thought to date and the sure sign of the great things to come. The text is Matthew 16.17: And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. The argument is that God makes use of natural means to communicate the knowledge of the arts and the sciences and skill in temporal concerns; but spiritual knowledge, spoken of in this text, is revealed directly to the human soul. In imparting this knowledge, the Holy Spirit acts in the mind of the saint (Edwards and the Bible s word for a converted person) as an indwelling vital principle. 18 Instead of just acting extrinsically upon the human mind, when it comes to the mind of the saint, the Holy Spirit unites himself to him, and lives in him, thus making him holy, a spiritual person. This divine and spiritual light, Edwards calls a new sense, a true sense, that is a felt experience of the divine excellency of the things revealed in the Word of God, and a conviction of the truth and reality of them. 19 Sense, excellency, reality these are Edwards s concerns. This spiritual light brings a real sense of the excellency of God in those 8 words alone, the three critical qualities are found - a real sense of the excellency of God, and Jesus Christ, and of the work of redemption, and the ways of God revealed in the gospel. 20 There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing; but there is a sense of the loveliness of God s holiness. 21 Thus there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgement that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man 18 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri,

11 may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man can t have the latter, unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. 22 In his application he says that this divine light imparts a knowledge which is above all others sweet and joyful. Here is the theme of spiritual hedonism again. Men have a great deal of pleasure in human knowledge... but this is nothing compared to that joy which arises from this divine light shining into the soul. 23 You can feel the temperature warming up as the fires of revival are just about to burst forth. Edwards enthuses: This light is such as effectually influences the inclination (by which he means the ruling passion in our lives), and changes the nature of the soul. It assimilates the nature to the divine nature, and changes the soul into an image of the same glory that is beheld.... This light, and this only, will bring the soul to a saving close with Christ. It conforms the heart to the gospel, mortifies its enmity and opposition against the scheme of salvation therein revealed: it causes the heart to embrace the grateful tidings, and entirely to adhere to, and acquiesce in the revelation of Christ as our Saviour; it causes the whole soul to accord and symphonise with it... cleaving to it with full inclination and affection The Revival Phase, Revival is the subject and substance of the fourth volume of sermons, covering the period 1734 to Here was Edwards at the apogee of his preaching powers. He preached about 400 sermons in this period, just under half of which have survived. Most deal with the subjects of conversion and declension. Five of these were published in 1738, including four of the sermons preached in the revival at Northampton which lasted from December 1734 to May 1735, including the magnificent Justification by Faith Alone. The effect of such preaching? I hope more than 300 souls were savingly brought home to Christ, reported Edwards. The fifth sermon was the incomparable The Excellency of Christ, preached at the Lord s Supper in August In it, Edwards celebrates not so much the feast as the affection Christ shares with his invited guests 25 more grist for the spiritual hedonist mill. This sermon recalls the sermon which I mentioned in the second period entitled Spiritual appetites need no bounds which was also preached at the Lord s Supper. Communion services, as you know, have often been the setting for great revivals, as we draw close to the dying love of the Saviour Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Lesser, Piggin. Firestorm,

12 In Justification by faith alone, Edwards explains that we are not justified by faith at all let alone by faith alone. We are justified by Christ, and faith is that which unites us to Christ, who is our salvation and our life. Any benefit we have in Christ, Edwards insists, is not by any value that there is in faith. Faith is only appropriate in God s sight, which is reality, insofar as it unites us to the Mediator, in and by whom we are justified. 27 It is the experience of being united to Christ which saves us. Justifying faith, Edwards tells us in this sermon, is that by which the soul, that before was separate, and alienated from Christ, unites itself to him... tis that by which the soul comes to Christ and receives him. 28 Shortly after I had worked through this sermon for the first time it is 100 pages long in the Yale volume of sermons I had occasion to counsel a member of one of Sydney s largest Bible-based Anglican churches who shared with me that he was miserable in his faith. He believed that he had been well taught and knew the theology and believed it all. But it did not seem to work. He did not feel that he was in a happy relationship with God. We Sydney Anglicans are given to saying that feelings and happiness are not primarily what it s all about, but he knew that too! So instead of the normal Sydney response, well, you are not meant to be happy, with the help of this sermon, I suggested to him that intellectual assent to the theological truth that we are justified by faith is not the way we are saved. Faith unites us to Christ, and it is that vital union which saves us. Intellectual assent is not an adequate response to the vitality of that union which is better experienced in the affections than affirmed in the mind. Feeling happy might not be an infallible guide to salvation, but joy is a valid symptom of it! Is it true of Sydney Baptists and of Sydney Anglicans that, they are like the committed Christians of Edwards s day, in that, even while they were insisting on the truth of the gospel, they were losing the sense of it? 29 Well, in response to this sermon, happiness came to many hundreds of souls in Northampton, Mass, in The Excellency of Christ is a highly successful sermon on one of Edwards deepest theological emphases, namely the beauty of God. For Edwards, beauty consists in the harmony of apparent opposites. The text is Revelation 5.5,6 which speaks of Christ as the Lion of the tribe of Judah and as the Lamb who was slain. With the lion and lamb as emblematic figures, Edwards explores the apparently opposing qualities in the mystery of the God s great plan of redemption: justice and grace, glory and humility, majesty and meekness, reverence and equality, worthiness and patience, authority and 27 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Lesser, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Lesser, Kimnach, Minkema, Sweeney, The Sermons of JE: A Reader, xxiii. 12

13 obedience, sovereignty and resignation, self-sufficiency and entire trust in God. 30 Our salvation results from these divine conjunctions in God s plan of redemption and in our own experience which are so harmonised or symphonised 31 that they are unimaginably beautiful. To paraphrase the rhetorical sweep of the argument, we might ask: Who is it who stoops so low to reach and rescue us from the misery and malevolence of the devils in the lowest hell and exalts us to the blessed embrace of the everlasting arms of the greatest love in the glory of the highest heaven it is Jesus what a Saviour, what a salvation. This sermon, which is really a gospel, a rhetorical history, a homiletical biography, of the work and words of Jesus, explores one such conjunction after another. The incantatory effect is overwhelming as he explores the justice and mercy of God and its application to the sinner s salvation. And the rhetoric of the anointed imagination is rammed home with the logic of the anointed reason. After juxtaposing the supreme dominion which Christ exercises over heaven and earth with his obedience even to death on a cross, Edwards concludes: Never was there such an instance of obedience in man nor angel, as this; though he that obeyed was at the same time, supreme lord of both angels and men. 32 The application of course is a classic appeal of the revival sermon: What are you afraid of, that you dare not venture your soul upon Christ? Are you afraid that he can t save you, that he is not strong enough to conquer the enemies of your soul? But how can you desire one stronger than the mighty God? as Christ is called (Isaiah 9:6). Is there need of greater than infinite strength? Are you afraid that he won t be willing to stoop so low, as to take any gracious notice of you? But then, look on him, as he stood in the ring of soldiers, exposing his blessed face to be buffeted and spit upon, by them! Behold him bound, with his back uncovered to those that smote him! And behold him hanging on the cross! Do you think that he that had condescension enough to stoop to these things, and that for his crucifiers, will be unwilling to accept of you if you come to him? Or, are you afraid that if he does accept of you, that God the Father won t accept of him for you? But consider, will God reject his own Son, in whom his infinite delight is, and has been, from all eternity, and that is so united to him, that if he should reject him he should reject himself? Kimnach, Minkema, Sweeney, The Sermons of JE: A Reader, xxiii. 31 To use his verb from A Divine and Supernatural Light (Sermons and Discourses , ed. Valeri, 424). 32 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Lesser, Sermons and Discourses , ed. Lesser,

14 That is preaching for revival focussing on Christ and the winsome beauty of his saving acts and the making of them real in our souls by addressing the affections in the power of the Spirit who unites us to Christ. And revival came to his people and their town, and Edwards reported on it in his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1737). 5. The Revivalist Phase, In his Preface to the fifth sermons volume (22), editor Harry Stout shows that Edwards changed his preaching in two important respects. 34 First, he changed his understanding of the way to present divinity from systematic theology, the days of which he thought were numbered, to history. He reviewed God s scheme of redemption in the form of what God was doing in heaven, earth, and hell. The sermons in this period illustrate that preoccupation with this three-layered history of redemption. The actors and places in this great drama are not abstractions; Edwards seeks in his preaching to give immediacy to Satan and hell as well as to Christ and heaven. Edwards did not confine his understanding of what God was doing in history to the biblical narrative. He read widely in secular history as well, and observed that God was at work at all times and in all places. This deep interest in what God is doing globally is the ground in which Edwards was to sow the seed which would flower half a century later in the modern missionary movement. 35 A second critical change in this period is that Edwards turned his rhetorical powers away from the beauty and joy of heaven to the horrors of hell. He is at this time less concerned to to woo his hearers into heaven than he is to frighten them out of hell. At the end of 1739 George Whitefield visited Northampton fanning the dying embers of the earlier regional revival into the flames of the Great Awakening. Edwards was fascinated by Whitefield. He could not preach in Whitefield s dramaturgical style, but he did do more of what he did best, namely employ rhetoric. The result is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, often hailed as 34 For the fifth volume of sermons, covering the period of the Great Awakening, twenty-nine sermons have been selected from 332 extant from the years A further thirty had already been published in volume 9 of the Yale Works, namely those which made up his History of the Work of Redemption. 35 The Expanding Knowledge of God: Jonathan Edwards s Influence on Missionary Thinking and Promotion, in David W. Kling and Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, The University of South Carolina Press, 2003, pp

15 America s greatest sermon, and it might be from a rhetorical point of view. With repeated cumulative arguments and illustrations, he seeks to awaken sinners to the reality of their danger by undermining their confidence that they ll escape judgement and hell. He does this by showing how precarious their foundation is, how it could collapse at any moment and allow them to slide into hell. The text? Deuteronomy Their foot shall slide in due time. Not only is the foundation holding them up brittle, portending inevitable collapse and disaster, but the weight above them, namely the wrath of God s anger, is pushing down on them and they cannot get out from under that weight and away from that precarious foundation unless they are in Christ. Another rhetorical device he uses is to allow people in hell to address Edwards hearers: No, I never intended to come here; I had laid out matters otherwise in my mind; I thought I should contrive well for myself; I thought my scheme good; I intended to take effectual care; but it came upon me unexpected; I did not look for it at that time, and in that manner; it came as a thief; death outwitted me; God s wrath was too quick for me; O my cursed foolishness! I was flattering myself, and pleasing myself with vain dreams of what I should do hereafter, and when I was saying, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction came upon me Rejection and Recognition Phase, The final volume of Edwards s sermons, cover the period They are the most turbulent years of Edwards s ministry covering his dismissal from Northampton church, the Stockbridge Mission to the Indians, and the French Wars which came too close for comfort. But they are also the most productive of his years in terms of sustained thought and literary output, and they are the years of greatest public recognition and international reputation, culminating in his appointment as President of the forerunner of Princeton College. Kimnach, the greatest of authorities on Edwards s preaching, fittingly edits the last volume of the sermons. He sees Edwards progressing from the almost romantic, mystic experientialism of his early ministry to a more objective conceptualisation of religion as grounded in the Trinity, actualised in history, and best expressed in the ethic of cosmic benevolence. The career long quest for reality continues, however, and there is nothing arid or abstract about Edwards thought in this period. The sermons exhibit his extraordinary powers of theological reflection on the issues of his day and on his public responsibilities. The early sermons in this period address the millennial expectations created by the recent earthquake of revival. His sermon Approaching the End of God s Grand Design (1744) anticipates the 36 Sermons and Discourses , ed. Stout and Hatch,

16 famous Humble Attempt (1747), his appeal to Christians throughout the evangelical world to unite to pray for the spread of the Gospel aided by the incentive that they would thus be co-operating with God to bring in the millennium. Then, as war came to displace revival as the chief matter of public concern, Edwards preached often on the experience of war. He saw it as not only shaping history, but also character, that is, it was of metaphorical significance for the world of the spirit. The Christian minister he came to see as a warrior, called to heroic service in enemy country. Edwards s sermons on war, Kimnach suggests, have contributed to the tradition of just war in American thinking. His Farewell Sermon, preached after his dismissal from Northampton, may be one of the most important of his sermons, not only because of the crisis in which it was written, but also because it reflects on one of his major concerns, the nature of the true church, and the role of the visible church. He sought to bring the latter more into conformity with the former since his idea of the true church was that it is a gathering of saints. A number of the sermons he preached on the ordination of ministers. They were printed at the time and will prove among the most useful of all his sermons to the ongoing life of the Christian Church. In this collection, too, is to be found the funeral sermon True Saints, When Absent from the Body, are Present with the Lord, for David Brainerd, his main model of the Godly minister. Edwards himself emerges as the truly heroic one as he steadfastly confronts with his intellectual acumen and theological penetration every tough issue as it arises, refusing to blink. It takes courage to be a godly preacher. Conclusion Edwards preached less on hell in this period, and it is normally suggested that he was no longer as interested in preaching awakening sermons. I am not yet convinced by the argument that you have to preach on hell if you are preaching for revival. To the end of his days, Edwards thought of revival as the engine of history, and history was the major vehicle for communicating the theology of redemption. I think that Edwards experimented all his life with his preaching. He believed that the drama of redemption was acted out in heaven, earth and hell. So he emphasised heaven and the angels in his early sermons, hell and the wrath of God in the period of the Great Awakening, and the coming of the millennium and the new heavens and the new earth in his later years. But no matter what his emphasis he always preached for revival, he always sought to awaken his hearers to reality, to the condition of the world and the condition of its peoples from God s perspective. Stuart Piggin Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience stuart.piggin@humn.mq.edu.au 16