The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Review Article

Transcription

1 The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Review Article The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 10: Sermons and Discourses , ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Pp.xv+670. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 14: Sermons and Discourses 1723,-1729 ed. Kenneth P. Minkema, Pp.xiv+575. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 17: Sermons and Discourses, ed. Mark Valeri, Pp.xii+480. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 19: Sermons and Discourses, ed. M. X. Lesser, Pp.xiv+849. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22: Sermons and Discourses, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch with Kyle P. Farley, Pp.xiv+582. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 25: Sermons and Discourses, , ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Pp.xiv+799. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney, Pp.lii+282. New Haven: Yale University Press, Among the regrettable deficiencies in Australian Christianity is the lack of awareness of the theological and spiritual riches to be found in the writings of Jonathan Edwards ( ), the last of the Puritans and the first of the Evangelicals, America s greatest philosopher theologian, and the human harbinger of the Great Awakening. The impact of American Christianity on the Australian churches, of course, has been enormous, but this has been chiefly through the revivalists of the nineteenth century, beginning with William 'California' Taylor ( ), gathering to a greatness through the Billy Graham Crusades, and continuing in recent decades through the technologists of church growth and the practitioners of Pentecostalism. The prodigious achievement of Jonathan Edwards, intellectually and spiritually, has been barely noticed. It would be a great thing for the theological colleges and churches of Australia to wake up to the great awakener. This is now more possible than ever because of the magnificent Yale critical edition of his writings, many never before published, which has now reached its twentyfifth volume. These include four volumes of his miscellanies where his most speculative thought is found, and six volumes of his sermons (here reviewed), including the sermons of the Great Awakening. One of the greatest experiences of my academic life was to work at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in 1985 on the papers of Jonathan Edwards under the guidance of Wilson Kimnach, Presidential Professor of Humanities in the University of Bridgeport. It was

2 therefore delightful in 1992 to receive his edition of Edwards s early sermons. Kimnach had written his doctorate on Edwards s homiletics, and his introduction to the first of the six proposed Yale volumes of Edwards s sermons, based on a close study of the entire corpus of the 1,200 extant sermon manuscripts, covers 258 pages. Here Kimnach explores the literary models which influenced Edwards in his sermon composition, the examples of his father and maternal grandfather, both preachers, the technology of Edwards s sermon production, his sermon canon and the relationship between his sermons and the philosophical and theological treatises on which his fame principally rests, and his literary theory and practice, including the evolution of two of his key insights, a divine and supernatural light and the sense of the heart. None of the twenty-three sermons in this volume has been before published. Seventeen of the twenty-three were preached in his first pastorate in New York from August 1722 to April So Kimnach adds to his introduction a 45-page preface on this period. He includes all the sermons extant from that period, allowing the fullest documentation of Edwards s intellectual, literary and spiritual foundations. It was during that appointment, too, 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, the evolution of his mind, and the first honing of his chief professional instrument the artistry of preaching. Already we detect the fusion of the affectional and the rational. In an age which finds the fusion so elusive, we need to emulate him better. Here, in love with the love of God, we find him keener to lure people into heaven than to frighten them out of hell. Already the incantatory intensity with which he pursued the truth, or better, the reality of God, is evident in these early explorations of the realm of rhetoric. 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 (from 11 November 1723 to 21 May 1724) which was not as happy as his New York experience, his appointment as tutor at Yale until the end of 1726, and then his appointment as assistant minister to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at Northampton, Massachusetts. Here he married Sarah Pierpont in 1727 and took full charge of the parish on his grandfather s death on 11 February There are about seventy sermons extant from the period from his commencement at Bolton to the death of his grandfather, and a further seventy between then and the end of The first period, then, was not one in which he was called upon to preach a lot, and when he did, he first re-used sermons preached previously. Then, from the Spring of 1729, the sermons take on a more programmatic character, driving his agenda and drawing together the themes which occupied his thinking. They are not yet great sermons: none was published in his lifetime and only one before the advent of

3 this volume. The most important characteristic of the period covered by this volume, however, was that it was a time of prodigious intellectual growth, reflecting the opportunities afforded by his tutorship and the completion of the requirements for his Master s degree. His notebooks and miscellanies record his reflections on his reading and thinking, as from a wide range of academic disciplines, he forged his Calvinistic system, at once orthodox and unique, and engaged with the thought, especially the new science, of his day. If the first volume of Edwards s sermons is particularly revealing of his spiritual growth, and the second, his intellectual growth, the third, edited by Mark Valeri, and covering the period , shows his professional growth as a pastor. His greatness, as revivalist, still lay a little further (one short year) down the track. His greatness as a philosopher theologian lay a decade away. While the years 1730 to 1733 covered a time of conflict and instability for his people, 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. Valeri s thesis, in his introduction, is that 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 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. This volume contains one gem, A Divine and Supernatural Light, a brilliant synthesis of his thought to date and the sure sign of the great things to come. But Valeri also finds here the seeds of his great philosophical masterpiece, Original Sin (1758). 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. Revival is the subject and substance of the fourth volume of sermons, covering the period 1734 to 1738, and edited by noted Edwards bibliographer, M. X. Lesser. 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, namely Justification by Faith Alone, Pressing into the Kingdom of God, Ruth s Resolution and The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners. The effect of such preaching? I hope more than 300 souls were savingly brought home to Christ, reported Edwards. The fifth

4 sermon was the incomparable The Excellency of Christ, preached at the Lord s Supper in August In it, observes Lesser (p.20), Edwards celebrates not so much the feast as the affection Christ shares with his invited guests. Many of the thirty-two sermons in this, by far the largest, volume of the sermons, relate to the sad, but instructive, post-revival declension in Northampton, which as he warned in A City on a Hill, was in danger of forfeiting the high esteem in which it was now held in the evangelical world. But Edwards never lost his optimism that America was the most likely destination of the blessings prophesied in Isaiah 60.9 for the isles that are afar off. He even suggested graciously that Hollandia Nova and Terra Australis Incognita would be candidates for the same blessing! (Works,5.143 and Works, f). 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. In his Preface to this volume (22), Harry Stout shows that it was a critical period in Edwards s preaching, critical in the sense of important change. 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. 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. He did not have the narrow American focus sometimes attributed to him by nationalists. In fact this volume contains the sermon God s Grace carried on in other Places where he informs a special gathering of interested church members of what God is doing in Britain (through the Wesleys and Whitefield) and elsewhere. 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. 1 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. America s best-known sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was preached in this period and receives sustained analysis in this volume. Stout contends that Edwards s resorting to fear as a revivalistic technique owed much to George Whitefield who visited Northampton at the end of 1739, fanning the dying embers of the earlier regional revival into the flames of the Great Awakening. Interestingly, there is some evidence that Edwards did not remain convinced that this was the way to go, and, at the end of this period, he returned to a more positive emphasis 1 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

5 which was to materialise four years later in one of his greatest works, The Religious Affections. In the final volume, covering the longest period, , thirty-eight sermons or fragments are selected from the almost 500 sermons attributed to these years and a further 47 undated sermons and sermon fragments. These 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 the mature Edwards turning from a preoccupation with religious experience, so central an issue in the Great Awakening, to polemical theology, the intellectual defence of the truth of the Christian religion. Put another way, Kimnach 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. After all, Edwards s thought was at that time fast evolving towards the masterpiece End in Creation. The career long quest for reality continues, however, understood as the integral goals of theological truth in his study and spiritual authenticity in his congregation (42). 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 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. Now more in the public eye, and, especially in the 1750s, engrossed in the writing of his massive tomes on philosophical theology, Edwards found that he no longer had time for his long-standing habit of writing out sermons in full. But he had never been able to preach from notes, much to his disappointment, and so the practice of writing sermon outlines did not work for him. Kimnach suggests that we can calculate the importance he attached to the various occasions on which he preached the sermons of this period by

6 whether or not he wrote them out in full. His Farewell Sermon, preached after his dismissal from Northampton, is written out in full. This may be one of the most important sermons of the period, 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. Also written out in full is the first sermon he preached to the Indians in Stockbridge. Preaching to the Indians, Edwards realised, would require a different homiletic style, characterised more by narrative than by close doctrinal argument. But while Edwards was prepared to use simpler diction in these sermons, the ideas are not simplified, and we find here a comprehensiveness of thought rarely found in his more analytical discourses to English congregations (30). A number of the sermons he preached on the ordination of ministers were also written out in full because they were to be printed. These sermons 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. The editors of these volumes, which are so rich in the fruits of the best Edwards scholarship, have also turned their minds to more accessible publications to help the church and the academy wake up to Edwards. There is, for example, the very valuable cheap selection of his sermons, entitled The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (Yale, 1999) edited (and superbly introduced) by Wilson Kimnach, Kenneth Minkema, and Douglas Sweeney, captains all in the now thriving Jonathan Edwards industry. This volume includes fourteen of Edwards s sermons, half of which were preached after the beginning of the Great Awakening. Among the sermons found here are A Divine and Supernatural Light, The Excellency of Christ, Heaven is a World of Love, and Sinners in the hands of an angry God. Stuart Piggin (Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience)