Jonathan Edwards’ writings fill twenty-five imposing volumes in the Yale Works. The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, a beacon of unfiltered light in American academe, has plans to disseminate many more online. Did you catch that, or did your eyes skip over it? 25 volumes! And they’re not boring or meandering. If you just open them, and start reading, you find yourself face-to-face with America’s greatest preacher, theologian, philosopher, and mystic.
Why read Jonathan Edwards? Let me quickly try to capture the essence of what makes Edwards so, well, great.
First, the Northampton pastor was a breathtakingly imaginative thinker, by which I do not mean “harmfully extra-textual” as it might sound (though he did love creativity), but rather that Edwards was able to capture biblical teaching in all its glory and nuance and breadth. Your average superhero movie is fantastic on a normal screen; when you watch it on IMAX, though, it’s a whole other ballgame. So it is with Edwards and his work. The biblical mind and imagination lives and breathes. The Bible seems living and active in Edwards’ hands. Of course, as historian George Marsden has pointed out, Edwards became an excellent writer over the course of his life, and so to read him is to read a marvelously gifted stylist, which is pleasurable in any field.
Second, Edwards consistently pointed up the power of God in Christ. This isn’t, interestingly, to say that he consistently gave the kind of quick biblical-theological summary of redemption now common in evangelical preaching. Jesus, however, was the ideal, the apex, and the key of Scripture. Not only Scripture, though—all of nature. When you read all the way through Edwards’ Miscellanies you’ll discover the man found Christ in moths. Beat that.