The other Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards’s birthday was October 5. While a growing number of Edwards-philes were quietly celebrating, most Americans (if they knew of his birthdate at all) were groaning.

They remember suffering through their high school or college reading of his infamous sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” and wanting never again to hear from this preacher who said God holds some sinners like a spider over an open fire.

They would be surprised to learn that Edwards was obsessed by God’s beauty not wrath, and that, as historian Patrick Sherry recently argued, Edwards made beauty more central to theology than anyone else in the history of Christian thought, including Augustine and (the 20^th-century Swiss Catholic) Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Edwards believed that true religion is when a person receives a “divine and supernatural light.” The Spirit must penetrate beneath the surface convictions of human reason to awaken a “sense of the heart” to see the beauty of the triune God, especially displayed in the beautiful life and teachings and death of Jesus Christ.

Therefore, he said, the essence of true religious experience is to be overwhelmed by a glimpse of the beauty of God, to be drawn to the glory of his perfections, and to sense his irresistible love.

George Marsden once wrote that it is something like being overwhelmed by the beauty of a great work of art or music. We can become so enthralled by the beauty that we lose consciousness of self and self-interest and become absorbed by the magnificent object. So also we can become drawn out of self-absorption by the power of the beauty of a truly loveable person. Our hearts are changed by an irresistible power.

But this power gently lures; it does not coerce. Edwards taught that our eyes are opened when we are captivated by the beautiful love and glory of God in Christ, when we see this love most powerfully demonstrated in Christ’s sacrificial love for the undeserving. Then we feel forced to abandon love for self as the central principle of our lives and turn to the love of God.

Edwards describes our side of this experience as like being given a sixth sense: a sense of the beauty, glory and love of God. He observed, “The Bible speaks of giving eyes to see, ears to hear, unstopping the ears of the deaf, and opening the eyes of them that were born blind, and turning from darkness to light.”

Therefore the spiritual knowledge gained in true conversion is a kind of “sensible” knowledge—as different from intellectual knowledge as the taste of honey is different from the mere intellectual understanding that honey is sweet.

True Christian experience, then, is sensible and affective. The Christian, says Edwards, does not “merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. . . . For as God is infinitely the Greatest Being, so He is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory; God . . . is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.”

This emphasis on beauty as the center of one’s vision of God was not unique to Edwards, for Augustine and Balthasar also used the aesthetic as a major theological category. But, as Patrick Sherry argued in his Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics, no one made beauty as central to the vision of God as Edwards.

For Edwards, beauty was absolutely integral to his view of God and redemption, so that no part of theology is complete without consideration of God’s beauty and what that means for human understanding.

Did Edwards also preach God’s holy wrath toward sin? Yes. But God hates sin, according to Edwards, because he loves the beauty of his creation, and hates what destroys it. The goal is the ultimate beauty of a redeemed creation.

McDermott is the co-author of The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford University Press), which won Christianity Today’s 2013 award for Best Book in theology and ethics.