Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards

by Kyle Strobel

When push comes to shove, much that goes by the term spirituality is really just an extension of our own desire to have a “better,” more fulfilling life. Just as we approach health issues, our posture is about getting it fixed as easily and quickly as possible: Isn’t there just a pill I can take?

devotion. What I am interested in is pointing you to Christ, because that is ultimately what spiritual formation is about. I am interested in turning you to someone like Jonathan Edwards as an example of what the Christian life could look like. Ultimately, the reason this is the road less traveled is that spiritual formation is not simply doing spiritual disciplines. Spiritual formation is about a life oriented to God in Christ by the Spirit. Since spiritual formation is not, ultimately, about us at all, but about God, we must set our minds and hearts on him rather than our problems, our shortcomings or our desire to change.

Spiritual formation is the Spirit’s work of transforming us into the image of Christ. Some people get caught up with this and other similar terms, such as spirituality, piety, transformation and so on. Instead of trying to figure out if we should use these terms, or trying to discern how they are currently being used, let’s do something different. Getting into debates about the most appropriate word is a pointless endeavor (2 Tim 2:14). Instead, we will turn to Jonathan Edwards as a source for wisdom about Christian living. In our pursuit, we will seek a distinctively evangelical understanding of spiritual formation. What does our grasp of the gospel tell us about the Christian life and faith? Furthermore, if we are evangelicals, then we must recognize that the terms spirituality, spiritual formation, religion and the Christian life all must mean the same thing for us. We need not grow faint-hearted by how the world and others misconstrue these terms. Rather, we should allow the Spirit to breathe fresh life into them. The key question then is, what do they mean? Christian spirituality is ultimately about the work of the Spirit to bind us to the Son in love. This is not the “spirituality” of the world. The “Spirit” in spirituality denotes the Holy Spirit of God. Spirituality is not about some innate sense of transcendence or something inherent in people. Spirituality is about the very thing we need and do not have—God’s own Spirit. Christian spirituality is a partaking in G...

In Edwards’s day, the phrase “true religion” was the popular way to talk about authentic Christian devotion.

contemplation of divine things. In Edwards’s grasp of spiritual formation we find a well-rounded account of following Christ, an account that deserves to be meditated upon in our day as much as in his own.

Many have called Edwards “America’s greatest theologian” as well as “America’s greatest philosopher.” But at his core, he was primarily a pastor/shepherd who sought to guide people to Christ. With such an impressive academic resume, a focus on the church and a deeply spiritual life, Edwards can be compared with the greatest spiritual writers in history (Augustine comes to mind). Edwards, in other words, is someone worth listening to.

Rather, if Edwards did have an obsession, it was the beauty and glory of God.

practice. Not all practices are considered equal; therefore we must understand how these practices are interconnected to guide us on our path to glory.

Take note at the flow of this book. We refuse to talk about spiritual practices until we have a firm grasp of the big picture of the Christian life. If we started with practices, as so many have, we will ultimately lose sight of their role in leading us to Christ. Inevitably, I fear, a focus on disciplines digresses quickly to self-help. Edwards offers a different way.

Out of the Puritan movement we receive the spiritual classic Pilgrim’s Progress. The idea of a pilgrimage to heaven as the framework for grasping spirituality is one of the great emphases of Puritan theology. Likewise, Jonathan Edwards focuses on the image of being a pilgrim in a land that is not truly our home. This use of journey language raises questions of where we are going and how our destination informs how we travel. The church has historically understood our destination as either heaven or hell. For Edwards, heaven and hell are not merely places, but realities whose powers are known now. Heaven and hell are fueled by love and hate respectively. Heaven is a world of love—a realm of beauty where faith, hope and love know their fulfillment in a family of people drawn together to the God of love. God, as Edwards never tires of telling his readers, is a fountain of love. The eternal and infinite love of God quenches the thirst of all who draw near. In drinking deeply from this fountain, love of God and neighbor finally reign perfectly. Hell has no such fountain; it is the natural consequence of a society of selfishness. Rather than remaining on the outskirts of our world, heaven and hell assert themselves in our lives. Those who know God, as revealed in Christ Jesus, have a piece of heaven abiding in them. The Holy Spirit, or God’s own love, is given to believers in salvation. The fountain that abides in heaven pours forth through the lives of believers now. Unbeliever...

To journey well in this life, it is important to meditate on the direction your heart is pointing. What realm serves as the true north to which your heart finds its bearings? To live a heavenly life now, one must “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:2). The “things that are above” do not primarily reference a place, but the Father, Son and Holy Spirit—the triune God. We must turn our attention to the source of the heavenly life so we can live the “way of heaven” here. To do so, I focus our attention on being with God in glory. Heaven is only heavenly because God is there. He is the spring of love that gives life and direction to that place. The life we know now is still given direction by that same source of life and love. God is the only source of the heavenly life, and therefore to grasp the nature of the Christian life we must grasp what it means to know God.

explain. Continuing with the image of God as a fountain, we can see ourselves in heaven as buckets who are full of God. Since we are full, we are perfectly satisfied, but our capacity continues to grow in heaven. We become larger buckets. We continue to learn more about God and love God more and more. As our capacity grows, we remain perfectly full, but since God is infinite he is never fully known. We are always growing and eternally expanding in our desire to know God and love him more—and yet our satisfaction never wanes, but increases exponentially. Heaven is a journey with God where we grow in love and knowledge of him for eternity; where our own love abounds to others in a society of love. Therefore, the term heaven refers to the day when love of God and neighbor reign unhindered.

Whether you look to John Calvin, Charles Hodge, John Owen or Jonathan Edwards, the focus of eternity is on coming to see God face to face. The word beatific is not some magical or mystical term, but points to the effect of seeing God. A sight of God, Edwards tells us, is “happifying” (which is what beatific means); it causes happiness to well up inside of the person. It would be foolish to think that seeing God is uninteresting, or maybe interesting only in an academic sense. Seeing God fulfills the design of humanity and therefore sets the mind and heart into motion—it happifies. Seeing God brings a person to complete satisfaction.

The “tip of happiness,” or, we might say, the goal of humanity, is to see God face to face and be embraced as his own. This is the land to which we, as believers, journey—a land where God dwells and where God’s love is open to his people in full.

The idea of seeing God is often related to the idea of satisfaction (happiness) in eternity, where God’s work of redemption is complete. In this sense, the beatific vision is a way to talk about the completion of God’s work of reconciliation—the culmination of what began when Jesus declared, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30). Life is a pilgrimage of faith that dissolves into sight. That sight is the beatific vision. Since the culmination of faith is sight, faith comes to take on attributes of sight. As pilgrims, we see through a glass darkly, but we see nonetheless (1 Cor 13:12). The life of faith is a life of seeing, even though the “sight” we now have is through a glass darkly. It is by faith, or what we might call spiritual sight (1 Cor 2:14-16). We have, after all, seen God in Christ, even though our “sight” is through faith. The life of faith is not void of sight; it is just void of physical sight.

In a real sense, to see God is to become like God. This biblical point will prove incredibly important for Edwards’s understanding of the Christian life. Truly seeing God is grasping him as the highest good, truth and beauty. It is having your eyes opened and taking in the reality of who he is. It is receiving the love of God in full and having God as the object of your own love.

The difference between faith and sight is that now, on our pilgrim journey, we see in a mirror dimly, but in glory, we will come face to face with God himself. This, for Paul, is tied directly to knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is not knowledge of an object, but is a personal knowledge, knowledge only available in a relationship of love. This knowledge begets happiness. In other words, knowing God, as Paul describes here, is always relational. “Seeing God” entails deep relational knowledge that exists in a relationship of love—a relationship available to us only through Christ, the image of the invisible God.

Keeping in mind the passages just overviewed, we can now focus on why this sight is “happifying.” In short, we can say that the beatific vision is the radically complete knowledge of God and his glory. It is a sight of who God is, and who God is for you. This sight happifies because it fulfills the purpose of human persons—to know God and love him. It is the culmination of salvation where God pulls his children to himself and communes with them for eternity.

It might be helpful to think of knowing other persons in order to understand. Coming to know someone is not simply a matter of understanding what defines a human person.

Knowing God necessitates God revealing himself to us, just as others have to reveal themselves. We come to know others through what they say and what they do. Likewise, we come to know God in Christ, his image, and in his work of redemption. Both of these are revealed to us in Scripture. This knowledge, of course, is not attained through sheer force, memorizing every aspect of the biblical text in an attempt to know God through one’s own effort.

It is important to note that the saints themselves do not dissolve into God. This isn’t a sort of Eastern mysticism where the ultimate end of a person is dissolving into the being of God. Instead, as the saint comes to know God, and the union between them grows greater and greater for eternity, the saint is upheld and made fully himself or herself. God’s purpose is not to overtake us, but to fill us with his life and love. God calls us to partake in the happiness he has known for eternity past and will continue to know for eternity future. Just as God’s life is not some kind of static floating, so heaven is not static, but is relationally exuberant. For eternity, the saints will see and know just as they are seen and known (1 Cor 13:12). This eternal journey is a journey into an ever-deepening love.

Eternity is ever-increasing and is a reality where we will grow in love and knowledge of God and our fellow saints. There is never any unmet desire because as our potential for more life increases, it is always met with a fullness of love. Heaven is, Edwards proclaimed, a world of love, and God is the fountain by which it is so.

The beatific vision is God’s act to manifest himself to his beloved. Notice again the deeply relational overtones. Seeing God reveals, without a doubt, that he is our Father and we are his children. God is not seen as raw power or essence, but as my Father. God’s transcendent glory leads to the knowledge that God is for me, that I am his and he is mine.

In the center of this beautiful picture of glory we find Christ, fully God and fully man, with the Father he knew from eternity past and with his people brought into fellowship with the Father for eternity future. The saints come to know God the Father as our Father through his Son. Heaven is the culmination of redemption, and God’s people will, without barrier, enjoy God fully.

True religion, as Edwards termed it, or spiritual formation as we have called it, has to do with the divine life given by Christ in his Spirit. Spiritual formation is about learning the way of heaven (or the “song” of heaven) and coming to see reality with one’s heart set firmly in the heavenly country. Heaven breaks into this world through followers of Christ who have been given the Spirit, living out the heavenly life in the here and now. That heavenly life breaks into the present through the gift of Christ who reveals the nature of God. Receiving this sight melts the hearts of those with eyes to see. It is not the physical beauty of Christ that melts hearts, but the revelation of God’s love for his people through Christ. Conversion, we could say, is finally having “eyes to see and ears to hear” (see Mk 4:9; Mt 13:15-16). It is “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph 1:18). Conversion is finally grasping that the divine life is offered in Christ, who was sent by the Father to draw you into the divine life of love.

A major failure in spirituality today is that it is seen as an isolated category. It exists on its own apart from theology, church and sometimes even community. For spirituality to be truly Christian, though, it must be integrated with Christian beliefs about who God is. This is particularly true concerning who God is as Father, known in the Son through the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, spirituality must be understood in line with a Christian understanding of salvation.

If you start with a Reformed understanding of salvation, with Edwards, that emphasizes God’s work to redeem and save, your understanding of the Christian life will likely be a story of how that same God sanctifies. Salvation reveals the kind of path we are on. The spiritual life is a part of and a continuation of our salvation. As a spiritual mentor of mine likes to say, we know salvation at the cross. It is at the cross where we find salvation, with nothing to bring or offer but ourselves. It is here where we come to know the gift of God in the sacrifice of Christ as wholly gift. But many mistakenly assume that the Christian life is lived elsewhere, as if we get up and leave the cross to live life on our own.[1] For Protestants, the Christian life is lived at the very place where salvation was first known—at the foot of the cross. It is here where we are saved and here where we are grown. The cross is not an event to leave, nor is it a starting line; it is the path itself. If spiritual formation is an extension of salvation, how do we understand salvation? We have already seen that our union with Christ, known in salvation, will ultimately lead us to the Father. In glory, we will share in the vision the Son has of the Father. We will share Christ’s life of love with his Father as we are accepted as the bride of the Son (Rev 19:6-9). If this is the end of the path, what is the beginning?

The images that bubble up to the surface are union, family and society.

Salvation is much broader than forgiveness. Salvation is about life with God. It is the path of life (Ps 16:11). God sent his Son to draw people into God’s life and family. Forgiveness is a step toward a broader purpose, a purpose that calls us to a life with God now, not simply to accepting forgiveness and waiting for eternity.

The Spirit is given to bind believers to the Son so that we can share in the Son’s Sonship. In other words, what Christ has by nature (Sonship), we are given by grace in adoption. We are children of God as we are in Christ, the true child of God. By being made children, God calls us to the spiritual life of children—a life lived as a pilgrimage to our true home. This is not a pilgrimage to get away from the world, but to live heavenly lives in it, lives defined by love.

In the Christian spiritual tradition, there has been a continual emphasis on an ascent to God. Themes such as Jacob’s ladder and Moses’ ascent up Mount Sinai were read in a figurative manner to describe the Christian life.[5] The problem with this interpretation is that it undermines the nature of redemption. We do not ascend to God because Christ has ascended to him in our nature. Again, our understanding of salvation will reveal the path laid before us. For Edwards, in his distinctively Protestant perspective, the path of ascent has already been walked by Jesus. Jesus is Jacob’s ladder (Jn 1:51).

Ascending in Christ is having Christ as the center of our life and existence. It is communing with him in such a manner that we come to be like him, taking on the way of life he lived. Ascending in Christ is becoming one with the human nature Christ sanctified in his life, death, resurrection and ascension to the Father. We are children of the Father in the Son. We come to live as his children in the world as we commune with him in Christ—just like the union of a bride and groom on the marriage day that is ever-increasing if they continue in a life of love. “Ascending” in Christ is grasping Christ more fully in love. Ascending is being one with him so that we live his life in the here and now.

At the moment of salvation one is united to Christ. This union is by the Spirit and can never be lost. It is a static reality. Communion, on the other hand, is dynamic.[9] Our lives, particularly the sin in our lives, can affect communion. Communion is a relational term explaining our experience of God. Importantly, even if we do not experience communion with Christ (maybe because of sin), that does not mean that we are not united to Christ. Union is unwavering because of the gratuitous grace of God. Therefore, the path we are on is a path of love as it is a path to heaven. The way is “uphill”—it is a way of ascent—but that is not in reference to “getting to God” or “becoming perfect.” Ascension is a way to denote the closeness of our relationship with God in Christ.

Because Christ is our path, our way of life, we can grasp the nature of this path before us. It is not a path of proving ourselves, because Christ has proven himself. It is not a path of building ourselves up so we can boast, because Christ has undermined boasting by offering it all by grace. The path before us is the path of love, and the path of love is the way of glory and beauty. Understanding the Christian life entails understanding our calling as those who glorify God and are made beautiful by God.

Edwards understood glory as a threefold movement. First, at its source, glory is God’s inner life of love. As the Father and Son love and delight in one another in the Spirit, the life they know among themselves is the life of glory.

Second, when God decides to create and relate to his creation, he does so by pouring forth his glory. To refer back to one of Edwards’s favorite images, God is a fountain (Jer 2:13). God is the infinite spring who pours himself forth in streams of glory. God communicates a true knowledge and sight of himself in his Son that causes his people to know and love him in return. To do so, God gives himself in his Son that we would “see” him (since the Son is the image of the invisible God). He also gives his Spirit, his own love, that we would love him in return.

The third tier of glory, therefore, entails God’s people participating in his glorification—knowing God and pouring forth love to him in return. God’s glory pulls us into a relationship of love with God.

Using images like mirrors and light to talk about our relationship with God has its limitations and can at times be unhelpful. That said, Edwards and the Christian tradition continually do so. For us, it is necessary to meditate on what those images are doing. The danger is that these images tend to be dehumanizing. We become mechanical: receiving light and bouncing it back. In this chapter and the next, we will see why this is not the case.

As we come to know and love God we reflect God’s glory back to him and the world. We become those who proclaim a knowledge of God and a love to God in word and deed. We become those formed for the glory of God.

Eternity itself is a journey in knowledge and love of God, a journey into deeper and deeper knowledge and love that is ever increasing.

A life of conversion is not lived in distress, as if we need to constantly recommit our lives to God. Rather, the Christian life is an extension of salvation. Conversion is a way to talk about the movement of a person seeking grace in repentance. This movement is the same movement of our hearts to God throughout the Christian life. Conversion is a model of the Christian posture before God: we come as the sinful, blind and those who wander from the fold of God, desperate for a God who gives us grace in abundance, opens our eyes to see his glory and seeks us even in our wandering. Christians continually open to God’s grace, rest in his way and seek to have eyes to see and ears to hear. This is a life lived for the glory of God.

Unfortunately, for many, when they hear the phrase “for the glory of God,” they subconsciously interpret that to mean “creatures are worthless.” This assumption is built on the idea that for God to be glorified humanity must be diminished. This is coupled with an idea, found in many praise and worship songs, that “he must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). This is a quote from John the Baptist, a quote that concerns John the Baptist’s specific ministry in relation to Christ’s ministry and has no relation to us. We, as persons, do not decrease for Christ to increase. That is no gospel. Our sin and flesh are not what we are. We increase as Christ increases, because when God is glorified we are fully alive.[12] Because God’s life of happiness consists in his knowledge and love, God is glorified as his creation comes to participate in that same happiness. God’s self-focus enlarges, so to speak, to pull us into it. As God infinitely loves and delights in himself, so God infinitely loves and delights in his adopted children. From salvation to eternity we are on a path of deepening love, delight and happiness in God.

The more one ascends, the easier it becomes. Since ascent is a relational term denoting our communion with Christ, we could say that the more we glory in God the happier we become. At first, we are more fleshly than not, but as we commune with God more and more we find it easier to rely on him for everything. This does not mean that we move beyond our sin or our flesh. Actually, the more holy we become the more we are aware of our flesh, sin and limitedness. The more we grow, the more we grasp with all our might the grace offered by God in Christ. The ascent becomes easier, not because we become independent, but because we come to grasp our dependence (and depravity) more fully.

This is why the Christian life is the way of love, not only because heaven is the world of love, but because God is the God of love. The Christian life is not an attempt to fix ourselves (self-help) or to seek self-fulfillment (worldly “spirituality”). Rather, in seeking to glorify God in all things, we come to find our true happiness, our true fulfillment, and we come to know our calling as ambassadors and witnesses.

Journeys change those who walk them. The change might be simple: an appreciation for newfound beauty, a recognition of your strengths and weaknesses, or even the realization that a particular path was the wrong one. The journey of faith entails simple changes, but it also demands profound ones as well. As we progress we come to deeper truths about ourselves and God, the path before us and behind us, and we come to glimpse what the rest of the path entails. One of the most profound realities discovered on the journey is that as we travel to the beautiful, we become beautiful ourselves.

We have to allow our view of the Christian life to be attacked by God. Therefore, we cannot start with an understanding of love and force God into it, since God is love. Rather, we start with God as love and then evaluate our life and experiences based on the God of love.

In present day evangelicalism, salvation is often boiled down to simply believing the right things. Saying the words “Jesus died for my sins” is often taken as a proof of the Spirit’s work on one’s soul. Edwards thought otherwise. He understood salvation to be more than putting one’s theological ducks in a row; for him it entailed a complete change of the soul.

Some feel a quickening of their heartbeat, and others, maybe a shortness of breath. Deep beauty moves us. Edwards uses this as an example of the Spirit’s work in the hearts of people in conversion. He tells us this divine light “assimilates the nature of the divine nature, and changes the soul into an image of the same glory that is beheld.”[15] This sight weans us from the world and raises our eyes to heavenly things.[16] This contradicts what many people think about Edwards. Edwards is often touted as a preacher of hellfire seeking to turn people to God through fear. Rather, for Edwards, the fear of God cannot turn someone to God. Only a sight of the beauty of God can save. As Edwards claims, we are not weaned from the world by affliction or through fear, but are only weaned off of the world by the sight of something better.[17] In Christ, God has revealed what is better. Once we see the beauty of Christ our inner clocks are set to the pace of heaven’s time.

The destination for the Christian is a sight and experience of God in eternity. It is, ultimately, life with God.

The physical manifestations of love point to a deeper union of two spiritual beings whose wills and affection unite in love. To be one of these people in love you have to be captivated, from the depths of your heart, by the other person. Beauty is primarily a personal and relational reality.