Lecture 19: Edwards: Lordship, Brainerd, Dismissal, and the Freedom of the Will

The lecture, section by section

1. Sinners in context

   Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was first preached in Edwards' own Northampton pulpit and then, famously, at Enfield. But Edwards preached on heaven more than hell, and the lecture credits expository preaching for that balance: letting the text set the topics keeps a preacher off hobby horses and away from neglected truths. Piper's recovery of Edwards also models something worth copying: adopting a historical mentor whose writings keep discipling you.

2. Emotions and fruit, again

   Reviewing the Awakening's critics: old-school pastors distrusted the outcries and faintings, and Edwards answered from 1 John 4 that emotion neither proves nor disproves a work of the Spirit. Paul's worldly versus godly sorrow gives the test: godly sorrow leads to repentance, and repentance shows in a changed life. In the Second Great Awakening these responses would begin to be mimicked and staged, the ancestry of being slain in the Spirit, but here they were largely genuine, and either way the fruit, not the feeling, is the verdict.

3. The sign of signs and the lordship question

   From the Religious Affections: Christian practice is the sign of signs, the great evidence crowning all others. This is not salvation by works but works as the evidence of salvation. The lecture connects it to the modern no-lordship debate: Zane Hodges claimed a colleague who apostatized into active atheism was still saved because he once believed, saying he has lost his faith but Christ has not lost him, the position MacArthur answered in The Gospel According to Jesus. From the fathers through the reformers to Edwards, sola fide has always meant faith alone that is never alone.

4. Repentance is a grace, not a work

   To the objection that lordship preaching breeds legalism, the lecture answers pastorally: repentance is a gift of God, as 2 Timothy 2 says, not a work; the struggle against sin in Romans 6 and 7 is itself evidence of a regenerate heart, since dead hearts do not fight; and the believer's obedience flows from love, for Jesus said that those who love him keep his commandments. Legalism earns favor by works; the gospel gives a new identity from which works flow with joy.

5. David Brainerd

   In the mid-1740s Edwards met David Brainerd, missionary to the Native American peoples on the Massachusetts frontier, who lived with the Edwards family and died in 1747 at twenty-nine. Edwards published his diary two years later, and its influence is staggering: it moved Edwards himself toward missionary work, crossed the Atlantic into the hands of a shoe cobbler named William Carey, father of modern missions, and can be traced missionary to missionary all the way to Jim Elliot. The lecture commends Brainerd as a historical mentor who will set fire to your prayer life.

6. The Halfway Covenant comes to a head

   Edwards concluded that the unconverted, though baptized as infants into the covenant community, should not be served the Lord's Table, the same fenced-table conviction Calvin defended sword-point in Geneva. After more than twenty years of faithful ministry, the congregation voted him out overwhelmingly. The lesson repeats across the course: Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, some of the church's greatest servants were treated worst by their own people.

7. To the frontier

   Inspired by Brainerd, Edwards took his family to Stockbridge on the western edge of Massachusetts as a missionary to the Housatonic peoples, continuing his scholarship all the while. From the frontier came his most enduring intellectual work.

8. Freedom of the Will

   Published in 1754 and counted among the most important books in American history, Edwards' Freedom of the Will shares a title with Erasmus' work and reaches the opposite conclusion, standing with Luther's Bondage of the Will. Against the Arminian claim that the will chooses from a state of indifference, Edwards argued by infinite regress that no choice is uncaused: people always act according to their strongest motives and inclinations. The unregenerate freely choose sin because they desire it; when God monergistically changes the heart, the sinner freely and joyfully chooses Christ. God himself has the highest freedom precisely while acting necessarily according to his holiness.

9. Princeton and a sudden death

   The Awakening's supporters, the new lights, founded a new college in New Jersey when Yale and Harvard leaned toward the skeptics; Whitefield was an early supporter, and Edwards accepted its presidency. Amid a smallpox outbreak he was inoculated, and with the medicine of the day the inoculation gave him the disease. He died in his mid-fifties, his tenure at the school that became Princeton lasting only weeks.

10. Kiss the rod

    Sarah Edwards' letter to her daughter after his death breathes the theology he preached: a holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud; the Lord has done it; my God lives, and he has my heart. The lecture draws the pastoral point: teach your people God's sovereignty when life is good, and it will hold them when life breaks.

11. God-besotted

    Piper's verdict closes the unit: every generation needs giants like Edwards to guard us from settling on small ideas about a small God, to waken us from pragmatic stupor, and to show again the beauty and power of truth, because Edwards never loses sight of the God from whom truth originates and whom it exists to serve.

1. Edwards was dismissed by a congregation he had served faithfully for over twenty years, for holding a conviction he believed Scripture required. How do you weigh conviction against keeping the peace in a church?

2. Brainerd died at twenty-nine and his diary shaped missions for two centuries. What does his story say about the reach of a short, obscure, faithful life?

3. Edwards taught that we always choose what we most desire. If that is true, what does spiritual growth actually consist of, and how does it change the way you pray for unbelievers?