"We should not let Jonathan Edwards be buried under the grotesqueries of his popular image."

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

The Old Testament lectionary passage this Sunday is from Amos, a prophet through whom the LORD denounces the wealthy housewives, expresses disgust at his people’s hypocritical worship, and promises a Day of judgment upon unfaithful Israel.

Taking Amos as the scripture passage, two hundred and eighty four years ago yesterday the Holy Spirit catalyzed the Great Awakening through Jonathan Edwards’ sermon in Connecticut, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Thanks to public schooling, Jonathan Edwards has a PR problem. The redacted title of my friend Brian Zahnd’s book betrays the critique, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God. Somewhere in the ghost of your high school brain is the haunting echo of this sermon— the one in which God’s dangling you over hell like a bored kid with a bug on a string. In many ways (again, see Brian’s book) Edwards is our national mascot for religious trauma. He supposedly epitomizes the toxic Christianity so many young people now wish to deconstruct.

This is unfortunate.

No one should be remembered through the lens of the worst story you recall.

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is the only work most Americans know of Edwards, whom Robert Jenson judged to be “America’s greatest theologian.”

Which is exactly why we need Robert Jenson.

In 1992, Blanche Jenson chided her husband for writing so much about dead German theologians but nothing at all about America’s most significant theologian. Just so, Jenson set out to reread and reappraise Edwards’ work, the fruit of which is his wonderful little book, America’s Theologian.

According to Jenson, the Jonathan Edwards we learn in history is a fiction. The “spider-holding, flame-throwing, Puritan terror preacher” is a version we’ve inherited from anthology editors and secular literature professors, not the man his parishioners would’ve recognized. Critically, “Sinners” was a sermon Edwards preached to his own congregation. They knew him and trusted him to deliver a word from the LORD, and he knew them as a pastor knows their congregation and the word they need to hear.

As Jenson points out:

“The sermon is almost entirely atypical of Edwards’ sermons generally”

Here is the irony. The preacher we most associate with fire and brimstone was actually a prolific proclaimer of beauty.

Seriously, the real Jonathan Edwards was not like Karl Malden’s preacher in Pollyanna; he was a mystic disguised as a Puritan— a mystic in a wig. Edwards was a philosopher as much as he was a theologian or preacher and for him, above all, Christianity was an aesthetic.

Indeed, I think one of the reasons we have received such a grossly inaccurate portrait of Edwards is that his theological and philosophical writing is too dense and daunting for many preachers to decipher.

Edwards not only saw the world shimmering with God’s glory but he believed beauty is the most determinative shape of the triune God’s being.

As both Lover, Loved, and Witness to their Love— a community of difference and peace— the God who is Trinity is beautiful.

The God who creates from nothing makes nothing but beauty. The world, for Edwards, is not a machine built by a distant God; it is Beauty’s love letter, written in the stars and the sacraments.

According to Jenson, beauty is the governing concept in Edwards’ theology:

“Beauty is for Edwards the most basic category of reality.”

Jonathan Edwards was not trying to scare the hell out of us.

He was attempting to wake us up to beauty all around us.

Or as Jenson puts it elsewhere:

“The place for all theology to begin is with astonishment.”

This, at least, is where Edwards also begins.

Edwards’ God is the triune God—eternally joyous, eternally giving. God is not an angry monarch at the top of the universe. God is, as Edwards proclaims him, the one who eternally speaks himself in the Son and eternally loves the Son through the Spirit.

God is music before the notes.

And we are creatures caught up into that melody.

Jenson says it this way:

“Edwards’ God is the triune God of scripture and the creeds, dynamically conceived.”

He means that the fire of God’s life isn’t wrath—it’s love. It is love so intense it burns away everything false. Even God’s judgment is about beauty. Even hell, in Edwards’ vision, is not a sort of divine temper tantrum. It’s the tragic, unnecessary refusal to be drawn into the beauty of God’s joy.

Wrath is no more the main note in Edwards’ theology than it is the main note in the gospel. Rather, wrath is the dissonance that makes the harmony sing.

Speaking only for myself, I would not want to remembered for a single sermon I’ve preached. Or, at least let me choose the sermon. Edwards was a revival preacher, yes. But not in the sweaty, manipulative sense. In fact, Edwards was suspicious of what Martin Luther called “enthusiasts.” Edwards’ book Religious Affections is essentially a theological manual for discerning the difference between the Holy Spirit and indigestion.

The real sign of the Spirit’s work, Edwards says, isn’t fear. It’s love. Specifically, it’s a disinterested love for God’s beauty, God’s being, God’s being as such.

Again, here is the irony.

Edwards wasn’t trying to save people from wrath so much as awaken them to glory. The aim of the Great Awakening was not to demote Jesus to Secretary of Afterlife Affairs. It was to woo Christians to fall in love with the beautiful triune God.

Though all we know of him today is that image of a wrathful God holding you like a spider over the fire, Edwards would be the first theologian to insist that God is not at all interested in dropping you. In fact, that you exist at all is proof he wants to share his beauty with you.

Edwards’ God burns with anger at sin, yes, because he burns with love for the world.

What Jenson helps us to see is that Edwards was never really America’s preacher of fear. He was our first great theologian of beauty. Of joy. Of the triune God whose being is love, not as footprints in the sand sentiment, but as metaphysical fire.

Jens writes:

“If we ask who in our past may provide a theological vision for our future, we should not let Edwards be buried under the grotesqueries of his popular image.”

The hands Edwards said were holding us over hell—those are the same hands that were stretched out on a cross. The hands that gave us bread and wine. The hands that still reach out, not to drop us but to draw us home.

Because in the end, the deepest truth of Edwards’ theology isn’t about spiders or flames, it’s the conviction that the Triune God is so beautiful, so radiant, so all-consuming in love, that even sinners are caught in his glow.

Robert Jenson is famous for ending his two volume Systematic Theology with the promise, “The End is music.”He got the line from Jonathan Edwards.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app