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How to Read Jonathan Edwards
Dane C. Ortlund
To read Jonathan Edwards is to see God. Not because Jonathan Edwards looked like God but because he looked at Godâsteadily, accurately, insistently. And then he wrote down what he saw. The result is that to read Jonathan Edwards is to have the horizon of oneâs inner vision opened up to irresistible beauty and uproarious joy, the overflow of which created the universe. It is to be coached into becoming truly human: radiantly, deeply calm; delighting, in this world of relentless pain and frothy joy alternatives, to receive and return love from Love himself. To read Jonathan Edwards is to see God.
This is why his writings have captured the Christian church since his death, especially in our generation. It is why Ezra Stiles, president of Yale from 1778 to 1795, was wonderfully wrong when he predicted of Edwardsâs writings that âwhen 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.â And it is why, perhaps, you have picked up this book.
The purpose of this opening chapter to a book introducing you to the major writings of Jonathan Edwards is to provide a general orientation in âhow to read Jonathan Edwards.â As I give guidance in how to read Edwards, though, I feel like what I suspect the baroque expert feels when told to guide a class of students in how to listen to Bach. The best way to listen to Bach is to put on the Brandenburg Concertos, turn up the volume, and open up your ears. The best way to learn how to read Jonathan Edwards is not to listen to someone else talk about him but to listen to him. Guidance from a baroque expert can help but only to quickly launch you into enjoying Bach. Guidance from this chapter and this book can help but only to quickly launch you into enjoying Jonathan Edwards. The book youâre holding will be a sage tour guide for you, but donât read more about Edwards than you read of Edwards himself. Iâll give some suggestions for where to begin later on. For now, I want to open this chapter by clarifying that there is no secret recipe to understanding and enjoying Jonathan Edwards. Just taste and see.
The first point to get clear in our minds, then, is not how to read Jonathan Edwards but why. And here is why. He turns our postcard views of Christ and the beauty of authentic Christian living into an experience of the real thing. What we had only smelled we now see. What we heard others call magnificent and considered overstatement we now see as magnificent and recognize as understatement. Jonathan Edwards gives us longings for God and for holiness that are more satisfying than even our best joys currently are. For some, he may bring us to realize that we were never converted at all. My own journey with Jonathan Edwards has walked me into a life of discipleship with Christ captured well by what Jewel the unicorn expresses as the new Narnia dawns: âI have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.â The Christianity Edwards walked me into was the Christianity I had been longing for without knowing it. It is my true home. Reading Jonathan Edwards doesnât send you out into some foreign and bizarre spiritual experience. You come home. Your humanity is restored. Edwards saw who God is in all his resplendence and wrote it down with such elegance and penetration that to read his writings is like moving from insanity toward sanity or from sickness toward health.
To be sure, Edwards had his quirks, and his distinct emphases, and his weaknesses, and so on. Every fallen theologian doesâand every theologian is fallen. Only one man is worthy of all-embracing commitment (Heb. 12:2). But Jonathan Edwards has few peers across the landscape of church history so uniquely effective in making real to the heart what had only been true on paper in a Christianâs life concerning the loveliness of Christ.
In the rest of this chapter we will reflect on some of the furniture that, when put in place, helps us understand and benefit from Jonathan Edwards in the ways Iâve been describing. After getting out before us the necessity of the new birth in order to fully benefit from Edwardsâs writings, we will consider his theological framework and his historical context. We will then reflect on where to begin reading Jonathan Edwards and what to expect.
The goal of this chapter is twofold: (1) more immediately, to prepare you for the chapters that will follow; and (2) more broadly, to launch you into a lifetime of reading Jonathan Edwards, so that you die one day a more radiant man or woman than you would otherwise have been.
The Great Prerequisite
The fundamental prerequisite to reading Jonathan Edwards is that you must be born again. Only the regenerate can read Edwards as life giving rather than threatening. How do you read Jonathan Edwards? First, be a Christian.
Many theologians down through the history of the church could be read and pondered profitably by those who are not born again. A theologian such as Abraham Kuyper spoke thoughtfully to cultural and political issues of his day even while doing theology. A thinker such as Martin Luther had an evangelistic bent to many of his writings. In his theologizing Thomas Aquinas drew on widely accepted philosophical frameworks from the past, such as Aristotelian thought, so a wide variety of readers could track with him.
But Jonathan Edwards lived and saw and preached and penned a vision of God and of walking with him that will be foreign to someone who has not begun to taste the same thing. He exhaled the air of eternity. When you read Jonathan Edwards as an unbeliever, you find yourself bewildered, perhaps even amused. When you read him as a believer, you find yourself enjoying the scent of something high and deep and beautiful that is beyond you, to which you are irresistibly drawn but find yourself unable to contain or domesticate. Edwards spoke of God not mainly as a system to be dissected or even a Being to be pondered but a Lover to be loved and a Beauty to be enjoyed. This will not compute for those who have not tasted and seen that the Lord is good. And...
