Editor’s Note: Dr. Phil Corr’s article reminds us that not just the UCC but American Evangelicalism as a whole owe an amazing debt to the theological work of Jonathan Edwards. His theology combined the profound Reformation emphasis on the majesty and sovereignty of God combined with the warm hearted passion for the salvation of sinners and world missions through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Edwards’ contribution desperately needs to be revived anew today. For an easily accessible work that is dependent on Edwards’ theological synthesis, consider reading CHRIST IS ALL by Rev. David Bryant.
By Dr. Phil Corr (c) 2007
A few years back I purchased Dr. Roger E. Olson’s The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform. A professor at Bethel seminary, Dr. Olson has made a significant contribution to scholarship in the field of history of doctrine.
Through biography and dogma, Olson guides us down the centuries of Christian thought.
In this tome, Dr. Olson dedicates approximately six pages to the theology of Jonathan Edwards. While that might not seem like a lot, it is a great deal when one considers the panorama being dealt with in this book–almost two thousand years of theological work.
Olson writes, “Edwards’s life was a remarkable one, worthy of a narrative longer than is possible here. Terribly unfair to him is his reputation promoted by public-school curricula [note by author: including my eleventh grade American Literature book] in the United States as a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose single contribution was the frighteningly judgmental sermon
‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’
Olson continues, but noting that many of Edwards’ sermons “still exist in manuscript form. Few of them are hellfire and brimstone in nature, and eyewitnesses say that when Edwards preached, he was articulate but not particularly emotional. He engaged actively in almost every controversy in New England and read and wrote widely on a variety of subjects, including
philosophy, ethics and science.”
“He was a revivalist who stood at the center of the Great Awakening that swept through the colonies in the 1740s, and he helped found the science of psychology of religion through his careful and critical examinations of religious experiences. He was a philosopher who was among the first in the New World to read and study the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke and the cosmology of Isaac Newton. Above all Edwards was a theologian who ardently defended the Puritan Calvinist doctrines against ‘creeping Arminianism’ and rationalism in theology.”
“Many North American Christians who call themselves evangelicals look back to Edwards as their hero–a kind of Augustine of North America–the formulator of a Christian worldview for the New World and a standard for integrating deep Christian faith with rigorous and disciplined intellectual life.”
“Jonathan Edwards’s theology was a hybrid of Calvinism and pietism in that it was not so different from classical Puritan thought, although the pietist emphasis on religious feeling is more pronounced in Edwards than in earlier Puritan divines.”
Olson looks at three “main consistent marks” in Edwards’s theological writings. The first has to do the “the glory and freedom of God.” “No theologian in the history of Christianity held a higher or stronger view of God’s majesty, sovereignty, glory and power than Jonathan Edwards.”
“Contrary to what one might suppose, Edwards did not merely suggest his view of God’s universal being and agency as one possible idea among others. He saw it as the one and only truly biblical doctrine of God.”
“For Edwards, a Christian cannot emphasize too strongly the absoluteness of God and the dependency of every creature, including the human person.”
“The second major theme of Edwards’s theology is the depravity and bondage of humans.” “Against the rising tide of Arminian theology among Anglicans and some Congregationalists, Edwards staunchly defended the doctrines of total depravity, unconditional election and irresistible grace.”
“The third theme of Edwards’s theology is the affections as the ‘anthropological center.’ The
anthropological center refers to the core of human personality out of which identity and actions flow.”
“Jonathan Edwards developed a psychology of the human person that transcended the known alternatives.”
[Author’s note: I view Edwards as a genius in this regard. Like Bach and others in various fields, Edwards took the material at hand, pushed the envelope and went outside it--making new constructs that nevertheless were clearly identifiable as Christian orthodoxy.]
“Edwards himself explained affections as inclinations in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: ‘The affections are no other than the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul… that by which the soul does not merely perceive and view things, but is some way inclined with respect to the things it views or considers; either is
inclined to them or is disinclined and averse from them.’”
Olson concludes his discussion of Edwards with the following observation: “Jonathan Edwards is without doubt one of the most important theologians of American evangelicalism. Many of those Protestant Christians of modern America who call themselves evangelicals look back to him as the quintessence of solid biblical reflection and belief combined with deep personal piety.”
Phil Corr’s work on the web can be seen at: haystack06.org and fccofcc.com
