So we find two strains of spirituality that weave in and out of the Reformed tradition in the two centuries between John Calvin’s first edition of the Institutes and Jonathan Edwards’s initial preaching in the Great Awakening. The one begins with a sense of awe at God’s majesty, the other with a delight in God’s beauty. We usually think of Reformed piety as a highly intellectual response to a transcendent God. Yet it lends itself to provocative sexual imagery in describing God’s love and to intense delight in reading God’s mysteries from the book of creation.
