Jonathan Edwards - loving God with heart and soul

One way God’s creativity is displayed is in making His people so varied. You may also have discovered that we are tempted to turn some of this diversity into tension. Like the tension amongst believers, with those who emphasise a ‘rigorous study of God with our intellects’, and those who emphasise ‘authentic emotional responses to God’. It’s seems an ironic situation we find ourselves in – assuming that we need to favour one over the other. Especially when the Lord teaches as the greatest command: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:29-30, see also Matt 22 & Luke 10)

Jonathan Edwards’ life and teaching is a helpful antidote to such unnecessary division. Edwards (1703-1758) is a respected giant of American culture – a renowned preacher, theologian, philosopher and missionary to Native Americans. He’s especially admired as one of the great figures of Evangelicalism. He ministered and wrote during the period of ‘Great Awakening’ across the American colonies of the East coast. 
These ‘Awakenings’ were periods of intense enthusiasm for ‘religion’ – well beyond any local revivals. The dramatic nature of people’s Awakenings (sometimes expressed in dramatic emotional outpourings, such as laughter or tears) divided ministers as to whether its origin was of God or the Devil, with such polar positions creating disharmony between the colonial churches.

Edwards saw the need to address the false expressions of faith – without rejecting all affections in the Christian life. He held together the importance of loving God with mind and heart in harmony – lessons that serve us well today.

Edwards lived and urged ‘loving God with your mind’.  His study of God was first and foremost by reading the Scriptures – more than relying on other systems or godly commentaries.  In his words: “Be assiduous in reading the Holy Scriptures. This is the fountain whence all knowledge in divinity must be derived. Therefore let not this treasure lie by you neglected’.  His own life backed it up.  As a young man he made a list of 70 resolutions that he read over weekly.  The 28th was ‘To study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive, myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.’  In storage at Yale is a Bible of his – that he had taken apart, inserting blank paper between each page for his notes, then re-sewn.  The scrawled reflections are a testament to his passion to love God with His mind.

He was just as passionate to see people ‘love God truly with their hearts’.  A true knowledge of God must lead to heartfelt worship & obedience.  He distinguishes between the momentary passions of ‘emotion’ and the ongoing inclinations of affection (the ‘more vigorous & practical exercises of inclination & will of the soul’). That to discard emotion from religious expression would be wrong: ‘true religion consists so much in the affections that there can be no true religion without them.’ So, it is right to try and move people’s affections towards things divine. However, expressions of emotion shouldn’t be blindly accepted - high exercises of affections, bodily effects, religious talk, good works, self-confidence, even examples of love –can all be the result of the devil’s counterfeit work.  The presence of signs does not guarantee that they are gracious – that is, the free work of God’s Spirit.  The real test of affections is the fruit of obedience it produces over time.

What Edwards did was of great service in his time and ours.  He emphasised the need to love God with our entirety – calling people of all ‘camps’ to serve God truly with all they have. 

In Him
Mark Smith (Assistant Pastor)