Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 63 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
After a sobering postscript on John Wesley's marriage, this lecture crosses the Atlantic to the man many call America's greatest theological mind. Jonathan Edwards wrestled for years with the sovereignty of God before it became the fountainhead of everything he taught, wrote seventy resolutions at nineteen and then struggled honestly to keep them, and preached the most famous sermon in American history. Best of all, when critics attacked the Great Awakening, he gave the church its enduring test of true revival: not emotion, but a changed life.
Returning to last week, the lecture fills in the record: Charles Wesley, with Whitefield reluctantly drawn in, engineered Grace Murray's 1749 marriage to John Bennett to keep John single, and John's later marriage to Mary Vazeille collapsed under jealousy and a ministry that left no room for her, ending in permanent separation; Wesley learned of her death four days after the fact. The Methodist writer quoted draws the lesson himself: a cautionary tale for any couple so consumed by church life that they leave no space for each other. We are called to be husbands before we are pastors.
Jonathan Edwards was born in October 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son among eleven children, his ten sisters so tall the church joked that Timothy Edwards had sixty feet of daughters. Son of a Puritan pastor and grandson of Northampton's Solomon Stoddard, he entered Yale just before turning thirteen, normal enough in an age when Latin-trained boys began college early, and graduated at the head of his class in 1720.
A violent illness at sixteen set off two or three years of deep spiritual struggle, the classic Puritan conversion-as-process. The sticking point was God's sovereignty, which Edwards at first bristled against; through regeneration the doctrine he had resisted became to him lovely, the fountainhead of all his theology, as it was for Calvin before him and George Mueller after.
Around age eighteen and nineteen Edwards wrote seventy private resolutions, prefaced by the confession that he could keep none of them without God's help. They resolve to do whatever most glorifies God, and, tellingly, whatever is most to his own good, profit, and pleasure, the seed of the truth John Piper would later popularize, that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. They resolve never to lose a moment, to live with all his might, to think often of dying, and never to do what he would fear to do in the last hour of his life.
Marsden supplies the balance: Edwards' diary records lows, decays, and weeks he called a dreadful low estate, sounding like Romans 7. Edwards himself drew the conclusion: resolutions are nothing without the work of the Spirit, and but for mere grace a man might be very good one day and very wicked the next. The lecture shares this not to diminish a hero but to humanize him, and to encourage every believer who has broken a sincere resolution.
Edwards' famous early description of Sarah Pierpont marvels at a young lady loved of the great Being who made the world, who cares for little but to meditate on him and walks the fields as if conversing with someone invisible. They married in 1727, the year he was ordained assistant to his grandfather, and theirs proved a strong marriage of true intellectual partners, affectionately chronicled in the book Marriage to a Difficult Man.
When Solomon Stoddard died in 1729, Edwards, twenty-five, became senior pastor of one of New England's most important churches. The lecture pauses on the ages, pulpit supply at nineteen, tutor at Yale at twenty-one, and points young men to Paul's charge that Timothy let no one despise his youth.
The Halfway Covenant looks like bare compromise until set in its covenantal frame: Stoddard sought to keep the baptized inside the covenant community and then preach evangelistically to them. A quoted sermon shows him pressing exactly the right question, how a person may know he is truly converted: by the workings of grace and love in the life, not by profession. Bad ecclesiology, the lecture judges, but earnest gospel intent, and the same test of fruit his grandson would make famous.
Edwards preached God Glorified in Man's Dependence against the rising Arminianism, and in 1733 revival broke out in Northampton. It spread until the Great Awakening proper, dated 1739 to 1741 within the broader 1730s and 40s, joined Whitefield's itinerant preaching to Edwards' pulpit; the two men met and shaped one another, Whitefield sharpening Edwards' delivery, Edwards deepening Whitefield's theology.
Preached at Enfield, Connecticut in 1741 from Deuteronomy 32, with Psalm 73 alongside, the sermon's argument is simple and terrible: hell is real, sinners deserve it, nothing but God's patient hand keeps them from it this moment, and their own care cannot secure them. The famous image holds the sinner over the pit as one holds a spider over a fire. Hearers groaned and cried aloud, and many were converted, because the sermon does not end in the pit: through Christ, the mediator, the door of mercy stands thrown open, and everyone out of Christ is called to fly from the wrath to come.
The old caricature of Edwards droning through a read manuscript has been overturned: he was articulate, intense, and increasingly passionate, likely spurred by Whitefield's example, and he preached on heaven more than on hell, something the American literature curriculum, which serves every eleventh grader one sermon, never mentions.
Old lights resisted the Awakening's swoonings and outcries; new lights defended it. Edwards' defense, first a Yale lecture, then The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God from 1 John 4, argued that emotion neither proves nor disproves a revival, echoing Paul's distinction between worldly and godly sorrow: godly sorrow shows itself in repentance and changed living. The Religious Affections presses it home: Christian practice is the sign of signs. We are saved by grace alone, and the transformed life is the evidence, the same standard, the lecture notes, later applied in the book Strange Fire to modern claims of awakening.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The fuller record of Wesley's courtship of Grace Murray shows that
2. Jonathan Edwards grew up as
3. The doctrine Edwards first bristled against, which became the fountainhead of his theology, was
4. Edwards prefaced his seventy resolutions by
5. Edwards' diary in the years after the resolutions shows
6. Edwards became senior pastor at Northampton
7. Set in its covenantal frame, Stoddard's Halfway Covenant aimed to
8. The Great Awakening's narrow date range given in the lecture is
9. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was preached in 1741 at
10. The sermon's aim, beyond the terror of the pit, was to
11. Newer research on Edwards' preaching shows that he
12. In The Distinguishing Marks, Edwards argued that emotional outcries in revival
13. The Religious Affections concludes that the great evidence of true conversion is
14. Edwards' test of revival echoes Paul's distinction between
All fourteen correct. Lecture 18 is complete.
Edwards resolved never to do anything he would fear to do in the last hour of his life, and then broke his resolutions and learned dependence. What is the right place for resolutions in a life built on grace?
Emotion neither proves nor disproves a work of God. How should that standard shape the way a church evaluates powerful experiences, its own or those reported elsewhere?
Stoddard and Edwards both asked how a person may know he is truly converted, and both answered: by the fruit of a changed life. How does that examination stay honest without collapsing into morbid doubt?
By this we know that we have come to know him: if we keep his commandments.
The lecture commends Marsden's biography of Edwards, the Resolutions and diary, The Distinguishing Marks and The Religious Affections, and, for the Edwards home, Marriage to a Difficult Man on Sarah Edwards.