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1 'Sweet Burning in My Heart:' the Spirituality of Jonathan Edwards Address Given at the Launch of the Jonathan Edwards

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1 'Sweet Burning in My Heart:' the Spirituality of Jonathan Edwards Address Given at the Launch of the Jonathan Edwards ‘Sweet burning in my heart:’ The Spirituality of Jonathan Edwards Address given at the launch of the Jonathan Edwards Centre, Ridley College, Melbourne, 29 April 2010. Introduction: who was Jonathan Edwards? Habitually, Jonathan Edwards inspires apparently-extravagant claims. Try this for size. ‘When the Church in Australia wakes up to Jonathan Edwards it will experience true revival’. So I passionately believed in 1985 at the conclusion of a life-changing study leave at Yale, working on the Jonathan Edwards papers in the Bieneke, the university’s library with the translucent marble walls. Here Edwards’s papers are studied alongside first-century papyri and receive the same scientific scrutiny. In that year I went to the launch of the seventh volume of the Yale edition of Edwards’ works. Since then a further 19 volumes have been published. Together they surely must represent one of the great achievements of twentieth-century historical scholarship. The selection of Ridley College, Melbourne, as an overseas campus of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, depending on your religious beliefs, is either auspicious or providential. The potential of this antipodean outpost to bless the Australian Church is incalculable. Rhys Bezzant, who is writing his doctoral thesis on Edwards, and is the human vehicle for this happy development, is to be warmly congratulated. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is often called the last of the Puritans and the first of the evangelicals. But he is also first in the sense that he is preeminent among evangelicals: none has approached within light years either of his ability or his spirituality. As to his ability, America's greatest living Church historian, Martyn E. Marty, has this to say, and it's a testimony which creeps up on you and suddenly ambushes you: Recently I attended the meeting of the American Academy of Religion and related sciences. There were gathered together several thousand scholars and teachers of theology and biblical studies from throughout this country and some from other nations. It was, I thought to myself, probably the largest concentration of theological minds ever assembled in the United 1 States at any time since Jonathan Edwards sat in his study alone.1 And Professor Perry Miller, foremost historian of American Puritanism, calls JE 'the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene'.2 While I am in the business of ‘wowing’ you with the greatness of Edwards, let me tell you that though he died 30 years before Australia was settled, he had, from as early as age 21, prophesied a role for Australia (which he labelled Terra Australis or Hollandia Nova – he thought they were two different places) in the evangelisation of the world once its own indigenous people had received the gospel. He was not only a philosopher, a theologian, and a prophet. He was also, and primarily, a pastor and preacher: for that more than ability is needed. So, as to his spirituality, here is Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ striking testimony: 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. So the task confronting me, if I may follow my analogy of mount Everest, is to decide whether to approach him by the south Col3 or north Col4. There are so many approaches to this great summit; but not only so, the atmosphere is so spiritually rarified, and there is this blazing whiteness of the holiness of the man himself, and his great emphasis upon the holiness and the glory of God; and above all the weakness of the little climber as he faces this great peak pointing up to heaven.5 Spirituality defined Now, before we go on to talk about JE’s spirituality, we had better say what spirituality is. I take it that, for a Christian, the thing which is most important to know and practice, is not theology, which is the study of ideas about God, but spirituality, the unity of the mind and heart in the experience of God. Spirituality is not about knowing God only with your intellect. It is concerned with finding him in the world of your own experience in 1 I have put this into the first person. John R. Richardson, An Interview with Jonathan Edwards, no date or place, p xivf. 2 Ibid., p.xv. 3 The lowest point of the ridge joining Mt Everest to the fourth highest mountain in the world, Lhotse. It is the route which must be traversed by those who wish to approach the summit of Everest from Nepal. 4 the pass or col connecting Everest and Changtse in Tibet. 5 The Puritans, p.355. 2 response to the intuition of your heart. It is experiential, contemplative knowing, not just cognitive knowledge. Cognition, the reason, is essential, but only in so far as it is united with the heart and experienced in one’s own life in the pursuit, not of the knowledge of God, but of God himself. Spirituality is about experiencing God’s presence; it is concerned with life lived coram deo - in the presence of God. Spirituality is concerned with seeing God, the beatific vision. And spirituality is concerned with seeing God’s face, not only in the Bible, but also in our world, in the environment, in nature; and seeing God in our hearts, that is in our experiences, in all the circumstances of life; and seeing God in our relationships, because God himself is a loving relationship of three persons. Edwards was one of the main architects of evangelical theology, and he was passionate about the need to find the God of the Bible in all things, and especially in creation (nature) and in all the circumstances and experiences of life (history). Spirituality illustrated in an experience of Jonathan Edwards Once, as I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception— which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me the greater part of the time in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. (Edwards, Works, 1, xlvii). Three approaches to the Spirituality of Jonathan Edwards 3 There are so many ways we can approach the spirituality of Jonathan Edwards. We can, for example, (1) tell his spiritual biography, his life’s story; we can (2) study his description of those whom he esteemed as the embodiment of spiritual graces, eg. his own wife, Sarah, and David Brainerd, missionary to the American Indians; and we can (3) read his own descriptions of the spiritual life in his sermons and his books, looking for his distinctive insights into the spiritual life. I. Jonathan Edwards’ Biography 1.1 An overview of his Life JE was born in 1703 in Windsor, Connecticut. He was one of 11 children – but the only son. His father, Timothy, was minister of the local Congregationalist church. His mother was Esther, the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, who was known as the Pope of American congregationalism. Esther was famous for her strong powers of reasoning, and she bequeathed these powers to her son, and he combined with them ardour of soul. He went to Yale college at the age of 12. In 1723 he was pastor of a Presbyterian Church in NY for only eight months, and then he tutored in Yale for about three years. Then came the call to Northampton, Mass. He was pastor there for 23 years during which time the revivals came, first in his own church in Northampton in 1734 and then the Great Awakening which blew the lid off New England in the early 1740s. From the experience of revival he distilled his understanding of the spiritual life in a number of books which have become spiritual classics - first in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1736) Then in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God applied to the Uncommon Operation that has lately appeared on the Minds of many of the People of this Land (1741) Then in Some Thoughts concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New- England and the Way in which it ought to be Acknowledged and Promoted (1742) Then in 4 A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) which is one of the most treasured of the church’s studies of spirituality. In 1750 Edwards moved to Stockbridge in Western Massachussetts, where he wrote his greatest works of philosophical theology, On the Freedom of the Will (1754), The Nature of True Virtue (1755) and On Original Sin (1757).
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