Jonathan Edwards was as New England as they came. He was born and raised in Connecticut in 1703 and among the first to graduate from Yale. For twenty-three tumultuous years he served as pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts where his preaching and teaching were fundamental to the most important religious and social movement of his day—the Great Awakening. Edwards oversaw an alternately amazing and disillusioning local revival that nevertheless became a prototype for one of America's most influential religious traditions.
Asking Jesus into your heart, the altar call, the Billy Graham Crusade—these all have their roots in Edwards. Yet Edwards' Northampton days displayed chronic patterns of revival and declining, of reformation and backsliding—realities akin to that current New England tradition of following the Boston Red Sox. A voluminous author, a missionary among the Housatonic Indians in Stockbridge, a devoted husband and father of eleven children—the descendants of whom were among the first pastors of Park Street—Edwards also briefly served as president of Princeton prior to his death from a botched smallpox vaccination at age 55.
Unfortunately, too many view Jonathan Edwards solely through the lens of his terrifying sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Granted, it is a sermon many recommend you not read at night. In it, Edwards preached:
Consider this, you that are here present, that yet remain in an unregenerate state. That God will execute the fierceness of his anger, implies, that he will inflict wrath without any pity. When God beholds the ineffable extremity of your case, and sees your torment to be so vastly disproportioned to your strength, and sees how your poor soul is crushed, and sinks down, as it were, into an infinite gloom; he will have no compassion upon you, he will not forbear the executions of his wrath, or in the least lighten his hand; there shall be no moderation or mercy, nor will God then at all stay his rough wind; he will have no regard to your welfare, nor be at all careful lest you should suffer too much in any other sense, than only that you shall not suffer beyond what strict justice requires. Nothing shall be withheld, because it is so hard for you to bear. . . . God stands ready to pity you now; this is a day of mercy; you may cry now with some encouragement of obtaining mercy. But when once the day of mercy is past, your most lamentable and dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain; you will be wholly lost and thrown away . . . God will be so far from pitying you when you cry to him, that [as] it is said [in the Proverbs] he will only "laugh and mock."
Jonathan Edwards, to put it mildly, was serious about his faith. Yet as Marsden also writes, ". . . when admonitions concerning divine wrath and punishment appear especially difficult or harsh or overstated in Edwards, you can better appreciate his perspective by asking this question: 'How would these things look if it really were the case that bliss or punishment for a literal eternity was at stake?'" Of course that such eternal bliss or punishment was at stake was precisely what Edwards believed.
However, while punishment of sins and the eternal rejection of some sinners were integral aspects of Edwards' theology, he was clear that judgment is God's "strange work" executed "for the sake of something else" and not for its own sake. Even hell, he wrote, "serves to heighten in the eyes of the saints the value of [Christ's] love and gentleness"—albeit by contrast. God's eternal punishment of sin is not an intrinsic response to creaturely fallenness, but rather what human sin desires and brings on itself. In its hard heart, human sin is not legal disobedience as much as it is the rejection of God's love. Love was everything in Edwards' theology. As the apostles Paul and John made clear, life means nothing without love, for life is found only in God and God is love.
Likewise, Edwards asserted that love was the core essence and energy of the Trinity. He viewed the Trinity as a perfect community of love, an eternally entwined relatedness that spilled over onto creatures and creation, making us intrinsically relational by nature too.
But where did the Trinity come from? How was the one God essentially three? Though Edwards wrote, "I am far from pretending to explain the Trinity so as to render it no longer a mystery," he still had his ideas. They went something like this: God the Father exists as prime, absolute deity who, like you and me, thinks about himself. However unlike our thoughts of ourselves, which usually exaggerate or otherwise distort, God's thoughts of Himself are infinitely perfect. So perfect in fact that God's thoughts of himself actually constitute another person; separate but identical. God's idea of himself is himself. This perfectly personified yet separate idea of God's self, Edwards regarded as God's only begotten Son. The second person of the Trinity.
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