Friday, March 22, 2024

It is the 22nd of March 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Last Friday, I told you the story of Gilbert Tennent’s epoch-making sermon “The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry,” the claim in sermon form by a colonial pastor that many pastors had not been properly converted, thus dividing the Great Awakening into two factions- old lights and new lights. I made a statement, made on other shows, that to know American Christianity you must know the Great Awakening. Once again, I felt a small twinge of conscience, knowing that after 1,676 shows, I have yet to devote one to the theologian of the Great Awakening and the man considered by some of America’s greatest theologians: Jonathan Edwards. I thought to myself, next time he comes up, I would need to do so despite his tendency to overwhelm me in scope and size. Then, as I looked at the calendar, I saw that it was on the 22nd of March in 1758 that Jonathan Edwards died. And so, today will serve as the briefest of introductions and explanations of his significance, and I’ve begun to plan a weekend edition of the great Puritan divine for later this year.

Edwards’s dates are 1703-1758, smack dab in the middle of colonial America and also in Massachusetts in New England, the intellectual center of colonial America. His grandfather was Solomon Stoddard, a congregational minister who instituted the “halfway” covenant, which allowed the non-converted, but we might say “seeking,” to have their children baptized. This would coincide with a growth in church attendance and a victory over the sternest elements within Puritanism.

Edwards experienced his own conversion at the age of 17 and set off to train for the ministry at Yale. He eventually joined his grandfather in serving alongside him at the Congregational church in Northampton, Mass. In 1729, with his grandfather’s death, he would become the sole pastor. As the Great Awakening began to spread with the itinerant preaching by the likes of George Whitfield and as far away as Great Britain, Edwards's own congregation began to see revival.  In the midst of a series preached by Edwards on Justification by Faith, he began to see multiple conversions, up to 30 a week. While most pastors would gladly welcome this, Edwards- always the dispassionate and philosophically inclined began to take notes. He would publish these sermons for public inspection and eventually publish his notes on the affair: “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God.” He would follow up these works with his 1746 work “On Religious Affections,” a sober account of the place of emotion in the Christian life.

He is a philosopher and theologian, and sometimes he switches from the pastoral to the philosophical in ways that can be difficult to track, but such was his genius that he was able to give voice to an energetic and passionate faith in the language of the academy. He was a thoroughgoing Calvinist who opposed all notions of Free Will in the unconverted but saw the will of the regenerate Christian as an important element in the life of the Christian. His bibliography is daunting, to say the least, writing on philosophy, optics, botany, and just about anything else he could observe or consider in light of the majesty of God.

He would also serve as a spark for the coming age of Missions. He knew his fellow revivalist preacher and missionary to the Native Americans, David Brainerd. After Brainerd’s death in 1747, Edwards edited and added his own thoughts to Brainerd’s Journals, a best-selling book that would inspire countless missionaries into the 19th century.

Many know of Edwards via his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” from, perhaps, High School anthologies and paint him as a firebrand preacher. He would have preached that sermon like any other, with a cool passion so as not to needlessly enflame his congregation. And while the imagery of the spider held over a flame certainly sticks with you, the sermon is ultimately a reflection on the even greater grace of God in Christ. 

Edwards would eventually be driven from his congregation when he altered the terms of his grandfather’s “Half Way Covenant” in expecting all those receiving communion to have proof of conversion. He nonetheless received a call to nearby Stockbridge and was called to be the President of the College of New Jersey, the former Log College that would become Princeton. This was in 1758, however, the year he would contract a lethal dose of the smallpox vaccine and die on the 22nd of March. Jonathan Edwards was 55 years old.

The last word for today is from the daily lectionary from Philippians 2, verses 12 and 13- an appropriate text for Edwards Day as it balances human will and divine providence.

12 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 22nd of March 2024, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who wonders if Edwards’s 11 kids with his wife Sarah wasn’t just a little overboard- He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man with two kids, the oldest of which is almost 15 and has an appetite of 7 or 8. I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.