The Book's Purpose

• Reveal how the life and ministry of Jonathan Edwards demonstrates true God-centeredness
• Envision contemporary Christianity through the eyes of a person whose life was ablaze for Christ
• Learn lessons from Jonathan Edwards’ life and ministry that we can apply in our time

The Book's Message

All of us are surrounded every day by people obsessed with pleasing themselves. The pervasive nature of individualism in Western culture stands in stark contrast to God-centered living. Significant practical insights into living a life centered on our Heavenly Father are available to us by studying Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century scholar-teacher best known for his fiery sermons.

New England pastor Josh Moody, who completed doctoral research on Edwards, draws parallels between the health of the evangelical church in Edwards’ day and its health today.

Jonathan Edwards in Our Times

While Christianity continues to be a growing force in our world, a closer look reveals some alarming trends. Shallow faith, growing secularism, immaturity, and moral bankruptcy are common in many of our churches. We desperately need to return to God-centered thinking and living, and one source of sound teaching in this area is the life of Jonathan Edwards, celebrated pastor and teacher from the Puritan era.

Jonathan Edwards lived in 18th-century colonial America, and of course his thoughts and lifestyle were influenced by the historical context of his times. And yet, because he faced the challenge of responding to the then fresh philosophy of the Enlightenment, his teachings and actions are particularly helpful today, a day in which we also face new philosophical challenges to our faith. In times of uncertainty, we can turn to teachers and thinkers like Edwards for wisdom and guidance to help us navigate these challenges.

As a Christian leader, Edwards had great influence in his time and beyond. Graduating from Yale at age 13, he completed a master’s degree at 17, pastored for many years, served as a missionary to Native Americans, wrote numerous books, served briefly as president of Princeton University, and had a large part in the revival known as the Great Awakening. He has been called America's greatest theologian and philosopher, and one of the founders of modern evangelicalism.

Edwards’ key influence may be that he developed a biblically effective response to the Enlightenment, a movement that engendered modern empirical science and the separation of church and state. The Enlightenment “unleashed the modern critical questions that have barraged the Bible and religious faith ever since.”

Once again in our day, society is questioning its foundations, and in a sense, considering the Enlightenment agenda. With Edwards’ help, we as Christians can formulate a biblical response to these philosophical challenges.

What would Edwards say if he walked into a modern church? He might be shocked and disappointed at the average sermon, which is much shorter and much less intellectually rigorous than his own famous sermons.“ Edwards’ sermons were long, straightforward and biblically relentless.”

His congregations were culturally much more biblically literate than today's, but regardless of his audience, Edwards built his sermons on solid communication of biblical truth and doctrine. If Edwards heard an average sermon from today’s churches, he would be disappointed by the poverty, brevity, and superficiality of the message. The result is so often insubstantial teaching and empty-headed congregations.

Revival Is Biblical

In Jonathan Edwards’ lifetime, he was a leader or participant in several significant revivals. Revival in his mind was an “awakening,” or an opening of one’s heart to spiritual need. “An awakening could lead to renewal, conversion, mission or a key moment in the history of God's work of redemption.”

Throughout Edwards’ ministry, he promoted this kind of revitalizing work. The Great Awakening reached across two continents and stimulated a great deal of social reform and evangelistic outreach. Many of Edwards’ books, as well as dozens of Edwards’ sermons, focus on revival. Even his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” at its core, is an appeal to revival~a plea to embrace the gift of salvation. Edwards preached revival as a broad-based movement that includes not just salvation but regeneration. He presented Jesus as God’s gift for the revival of mankind. Jesus, he said, is “a God-initiated supernatural invasion from heaven.”

In modern-day churches, the understanding and practice of revival tends be less pure, less revolutionary, and less effective. Contemporary “revivals” can have the flavor of a religious carnival, where the programs are circus-like and superficial, and their impact is insignificant if not damaging.

How can we imitate Jonathan Edwards’ practice of revival instead? According to Edwards, while revival is an act of God, we can take deliberate steps to make revival more likely to occur in our churches.

Edwards’ example would suggest these two strategic steps toward revival:

Revive strong preaching, with careful explanation of the text and relevant application. Preach with logic and fire, teaching the old message in a new way appropriate for today. “If new light is to break into our world, it will be from sparks flying from the anvil of disciplined study of the Scriptures. Edwards’ preaching was neither boring nor irrelevant nor superficial. It was electric.” Our preaching today must be full of fire and life, based solidly on scriptural teachings.

Revive the church, and renew our vision to be salt and light in our communities. We must seek God’s kingdom first and help build our societies outside the walls of our churches. We must band together in a “concert of prayer” to pray for the revival of our world. Revival as a principled reliance upon and expectation of divine initiative for the advance of the kingdom through God-given means is what we should embrace.”

“The blood sacrifice must always remain central,” the children of Israel learned at Gilgal, where they celebrated Passover. As they placed the blood of a lamb on their doorposts, the Israelites were reminded of both God’s provision and protection.

Today we recognize that it’s only the blood of Christ that protects us from God’s judgment of sin. We can’t earn forgiveness through good behavior; there’s nothing we can do to earn it!

Heart Experience

A central issue in our Christian journey is knowing whether or not we are truly experiencing God. We claim to have a personal relationship with God, but what that means can vary greatly from person to person. Do we base our perceptions on feelings of intimacy~and are those feelings reliable? Does God really “tell” people what path to take? Our churches do not typically offer many sound answers. There is little instruction in ways to detect manipulation or discern false spiritual experiences.

Jonathan Edwards promoted two strategies for good discernment, the “sense” of true experience and the “signs” of true experience. His responses to the skepticism that marked the Enlightenment help us as we respond to the skepticism that is a characteristic of postmodernism.

Edwards responded to the Enlightenment in a solidly biblical and intellectually credible way, by pointing to spiritual experience as God-focused. Our relationship with God is based not on our feelings, he argued, but on the fact of God's redemption. What God did for us assures us of our spiritual experience. Our knowledge of God at work is a true “sense” of God. “To be genuine, the experience must be of the ‘things revealed in the word of God,’ it must be biblical, lead to a relish of biblical truth, and not pretend to teach new information not found in the Bible.”

Someone who is truly converted will be moved with passion for God, which involves not only the emotions but also the heart, the mind, the will~all of the rational components of our being. Edwards taught that this “sense” of spiritual experience is evident throughout Scripture. Our entire souls are motivated and desirous of the things of God when we have a true spiritual experience.

In our modern age, new and alternative Christian movements are continually sprouting. How do we know whether such movements are truly from God?

By Their Fruit

We clearly need biblical discernment when myriad spiritual experiences and options abound. Various Christian fads and fashions can lead to mindless choices and spiritual shallowness and error. How can we analyze and thus use discernment? Edwards would say we test the root by the fruit. We judge based upon the results and the character a movement produces in individual lives. As Jesus said in Matthew 7, “by your fruit you will recognize them.” Look for doctrinal soundness, and then look for the results, using these seven key principles:

Negative signs: Identifying non-signs is a critical element in discovering genuine signs. New or unusual methods of doing things are not indicators as to whether or not they are of God. Likewise, physical effects (groanings, trembling, tears) are not reliable indicators of genuineness.

Spiritual origin: Positive signs are “what the devil either cannot or will not do, [and] are beyond human capacity to imitate, and therefore must be God at work.” When people are convicted of sin and drawn toward God, it must be His work.

New sense: When we have a renewed sense of understanding~eyes and ears that are opened to what God is revealing~that is a distinguishing mark of the work of God.

Esteeming truth: A growing respect for the truth is another clear mark of spiritual fruit.

Humble love: The ultimate sign of fruit for Edwards was a desire and ability to love. Humility shines through when God is truly at work. Discernment, not judgment: God’s work in our lives does not make us judges of one another and should not make us arrogant as we grow spiritually. We can discern, but God is the only judge.

Passion, not passivity: Spiritual experience is a call to action. Truth equips us to be passionately involved in loving those around us.

We can apply these principles of discernment not only to new movements, developments, ideas and churches, but also to the human soul. They will help us choose wisely what to support and be a part of in the modern world.

Modernism's Plight

While the economic growth of the modern world has given many a level of wealth and privilege that was unimaginable just a century ago, the postmodern world has left millions in poverty. Great gains have come from modern culture, and yet there is the sense that something is missing. The scourges of crime, disease, and immoral behavior are still with us.

What would Edwards say is the cause of modernity's ills? It is a foundation that lacks God as its center. “In his view, life, reality, existence, and therefore all sustainable prosperity and social interaction of whatever kind, are founded upon God, rely upon him and must be given to him as an act of worship.”

Edwards promoted his view of a God-centered life in his preaching and his writing, both published and unpublished. In all his work, the implication is that we are not here for ourselves, but for God. In our decision-making, our ministries, our intellectual framework, and in our service we are to be seeking God’s glory and not our own. “He viewed this God-centeredness as the antidote to the emerging materialistic, relativistic and humanistic strains within the Enlightenment.”

Jonathan Edwards viewed our will as inevitably God-centered. In his book The Freedom of the Will, he explains that God gives us freedom. Yet, as a Calvinist, he believed that everything we think or do is ultimately under the sovereign rule of God. We are free to make decisions, he believed, but we decide on the basis of what we like or appreciate or hold worthy of our choice. And ultimately, God has already determined what we like or esteem, by virtue of our circumstances, genetics, or environment. We assume we are making decisions about our lives, but in truth we are connected in a web of influences that actually control our destinies.

Edwards’ final point would be that we are only truly free when we submit to the will of God.

And so when humans ask the ultimate questions, “Why am I here? What is my purpose?” Edwards turns us toward God. True satisfaction and fulfillment of purpose can only be found when we turn away from ourselves and turn toward God.

Edwards’ preaching was a central part of his efforts to teach and model God-centeredness. The danger in today's churches is that our preaching is often driven by the expectations of our audience rather than by the Word. Human-centered messages aim to please rather than persuade of biblical truth. Edwards’ sermons focused on God's agenda, on a Godcentered intellectual framework, and a God-honoring application to the lives of his parishioners.

Let us clarify further the difference between God-centered and humancentered lives from Edwards’ perspective. A human-centered perspective promotes high self-esteem as a central value of life. When we value ourselves and love ourselves, we can then be responsible as we value and help others. The problem with basing our values on high self-esteem is that it is a highly unstable perspective. The presence of original and pervasive sin in our lives means that our sense worth and value will fluctuate as our self-esteem fluctuates. When instead we think biblically, we realize that all that is good about us comes from God and this good is the result of His redemptive work. Only by God’s grace we are what we are.

Some might say that modern life is build upon individualism, which is a form of human-centeredness. Are we saying that we should throw out all of modern society and adopt a theocracy? “Indeed, the modern concept of the individual appears to be derived from a humanistic sense of the freedom of individual rights. On the contrary, however, individual freedoms and self-expression can be guaranteed only by the assertion of God and a God-centered view of life.”

Clearly, the very freedoms we have to embrace religion or choose not to were won within a distinctly Christian philosophical framework. Individual freedom derives from the sanctity of life taught in the Bible. Humans have high value because they are made in God’s image. These cherished freedoms are most threatened when we turn instead to a human-centered philosophy, which holds that humans become valuable merely for how useful or productive they are.

What if we could be driven solely by the question, What will please God in this?

Secondary Can Be Primary

Most people know two things about Jonathan Edwards: that he preached a sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and that he was ejected from his pulpit. While Edwards did preach vigorously and frequently about the reality of hell, we must understand that these sermons were in the context of a lifetime of biblical teaching about many subjects. He preached about hell as a proclamation of the truth of judgment and as a means to help people come to God. And the fact that he was ejected from his church became a God-ordained opportunity for Edwards to minister as a missionary to the Native Americans and settlers on the frontier. Freedom from the business of the church also enabled Edwards to focus on writing books, which allowed his teachings to have an even broader influence.

Although an unfortunate occurrence in his life, Edwards’ loss of his church responsibilities can teach us much by way of both positive and negative example. The source of the conflict was a communion controversy, in which members of his church disagreed over who should be allowed to partake in Holy Communion. Edwards had strong feelings about this~he held that only those with a personal commitment to Christ should participate in this sacrament of the church.

Edwards had inherited a church in which members who had grown up in the church could take communion, whether they had truly been converted or not. They had been baptized as infants, included in all church activities, and so were duly allowed to participate in communion. The church had become more of a political body rather than a spiritual one. For Edwards, the issue became one of either pleasing the people or following what he believed was scriptural. Consequently, it became a key issue leading to his loss of the pastorate.

Similar questions face us today. Will we will follow our cultural norms or boldly follow what Scripture teaches? Where are our hearts? Will we take the easier, culturally acceptable way, or will we choose the difficult, culture-defying way?

Careful thinking and prudent decision-making based on scriptural principles are rare in an age of dumbed-down religion in which doctrine is optional and comfort is more important than commitment. Christian discipleship calls us to friction and conflict and going against the mainstream. We must purify, reform, and shape the church to be in line with biblical thinking.

Church becomes “nothing more than a vaguely religious gathering or a society built around basic moral axioms, a gathering where people float like amoebas in a soup of doctrinal spinelessness.”

The salvation message is not a product; it is a life-changing message. Edwards was not against innovation and creativity. He supported such radical preachers as George Whitefield. He believed that the church must continually adapt to meet the needs of each generation. Nevertheless, he held, it must hold true to Scripture and not bend with the changing morals of the culture.

Effective Biblical Leadership

Who can say what caused the captain of the Titanic to neglect his duties and “fall asleep at the wheel”? We will never know, but we can assume that his mind was not engaged on his most fundamental task, getting his ship safely to its destination. In a similar way, the great “ship” Evangelicalism faces the danger of confident but unthinking leaders.

While God does not require that every person He uses has superior intelligence (consider Balaam’s donkey), He does desire that we use our natural capacities, whether great or small. It is faith that Hebrews highlights in chapter 11, and it is faith combined with intelligence that characterizes effective Christian leaders. A biblically intelligent leader is what God desires for those in His service.

Edwards personifies these qualities in astounding measure. Edwards left thousands of pages of personal notes on the Scriptures, daily sharpening his mental and biblical skills. “God’s Word rippled throughout Edwards' mind.” He wrestled with the interplay between reason and Scripture. He engaged vigorously with contemporary ideas, and he built his arguments clearly and concisely. He developed faithful, biblical responses to current issues. He noted and described many proofs for the historicity of the Bible and the reasonableness of scriptural truth.

Edwards wrote and taught four principles of biblical intelligence: that reason befriends faith, that reason defends faith, that reason intends faith, and that faith mends reason.

These principles have implications for practical ministry, so it comes as no surprise that they led to great effectiveness in Edwards’ leadership of the church. Most evident during the time of the Great Awakening, Edwards used great wisdom in handling some of the radical responses to the revival. There was a great deal of social upheaval, yet Edwards discerned carefully what was the result of God's work and what was not. He looked for the fruit of righteousness.

Edwards’ biblical intelligence also infused his preaching and teaching. He was an amazingly bright person, and much of his influence may be attributed to people mentally responding, “If this man, who is so clever, believes these truths, which might seem so strange, should I not believe them too?”

Being a genius is not a requirement for leadership~but the ability to teach, persuade, and articulate the truth is at the very heart of proclaiming the gospel in a compelling way. Pastoral ministry is important as well, as is managing the business of the church. However, we must hold high the value of effectively and credibly communicating the gospel.

The Edwards Ministry and Message

As we interact every day with post-Enlightenment postmodernism, Jonathan Edwards has a great deal to offer us; he modeled ways to interact with the Enlightenment secularism that was so pervasive in his time. Specifically, he believed, preached, and lived out the following seven insights:

• Revival is biblical and a gift from God. Edwards saw revival as “God’s premier means of advancing His kingdom.”

• True experience of God is a heart experience. Jonathan Edwards was convinced that we must think of and embrace spiritual experience on both feeling and thinking levels. True experiences of God, he taught, combined “the soul’s abilities to will, think, and feel in encountering the living God.”
• There are ways to analyze new Christian movements by their fruit and we must do so.

• The central problem of our humanistic age is its failure to be God-centered. We must retool the way we think around the sovereignty of God in a culture in the habit of replacing God’s unwavering truth with public debate, science, entertainment, and a host of other man-made inventions.
• We must stay true to Scripture in all issues, great and small. Although Edwards taught the essentials of the gospel regularly, he realized that we cannot and should not overlook the non-essentials, since they were also taught in the Scriptures.
• Effective leadership is biblically intelligent leadership. It is imperative that all Christian leaders take great pains to allow the Bible to shape their intellectual presuppositions. “Edwards was astonishingly intelligent, but what most surprised contemporary observers was his thorough Bible-soaked approach to all matters.”
• Family life and ministry can and should complement one another. Jonathan Edwards understood how to balance the demands of ministry with the demands of raising a family. He and his remarkable wife, Sarah, had 11 children; 10 lived to adulthood. A 1961 film, Crisis in Morality, tells about investigating the accomplishments of 1,395 of Edwards’ descendants at that time. Among them were 13 college presidents, 65 college professors, 3 United States senators, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, 60 physicians, 75 military officers, 60 authors, and 1 vice-president of the United States.

All of us fail; any good we do is God's work in us. We are not able to truly please Him without His grace enabling us. And yet Christ gives us the privilege of rising to heights of achievement through Him and for His glory. Just like any of the rest of us, Jonathan Edwards experienced difficulties and failures. He learned from them~and we can too.

Here are a few examples: Like many others of his time, he considered slavery a necessary part of a healthy economy. And while he tacitly approved of slavery, he also treated his slaves with respect and kindness, and he admitted them into full membership of his church. “He felt it was impossible to escape the reality of slavery in his world, and so it was necessary to make the best of it.”

Jonathan Edwards remained fairly distant from his parishioners, and he failed to build strong personal relationships within his congregation. Because he spent so much time in study and sermon preparation, he focused little on pastoral care. Sadly, because few knew him intimately, he had little support when controversy developed. In short order these issues escalated, and Edwards lost his parish.

Edwards made major changes in a sudden and aggressive way. He did not choose to patiently, gently introduce change and its reasons. He did not lay groundwork with discussion and planning. His sudden changes caused much strife and discomfort within his church.

Edwards learned that “to know ... God, in His greatness, uses even our frailties and weaknesses for His glory.”