The Theology of Jonathan Edwards LESSON 04 of 24 · thank God Jonathan Edwards wasted his time being an expositor of the Word of God. It’s my personal opinion that no one has

Transcript - CH504 The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

© 2015 Christian University GlobalNet. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 04 of 24CH504

Doctrine of the Scriptures, Part 2

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

John H. Gerstner, PhD, DD

Experience: Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

This is lecture 4 in our series on the theology of Jonathan Edwards. It’s the second on the Scripture that concludes our study of Edward’s view of Scripture. Let us pray. O, our God and Father, how we thank Thee that Thou hast been pleased to open Thy sacred mouth and speak to Thy servants about the way of everlasting salvation. We are also grateful that Thou hast given faith men down through the ages who have labored strenuously and faithfully and frequently brilliantly in the ascertaining of what Thou hast said. We thank Thee for Edwards, and we pray that we may learn from him what we may about Thy Word and the way Thy Word comes home to us. Help us to call no man Father, but to sit in judgment about Edwards or anybody else’s thought, just as they would have us do in our fidelity to Thy Word as we understand it. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

We mentioned to you the last time that Edwards clearly believes in the inerrant Holy Scriptures and doesn’t hesitate to use the language even of dictation but manifestly understands it in a way that is a no sense mechanical but in every way utilizes almost the spontaneity of the writers even though what they write is nothing less and the very words of Holy Scripture as if God had dictated it. We also mentioned something of what Edwards was as a biblical critic and showed you some of his ways of defending the Bible against criticisms which are current in the twentieth century and were not absent in the eighteenth century either.

I would like to go into a fuller description of the Edwardsian thinking about the canon, but I don’t have time for that. I will mention simply this much: that Edwards did believe in the inspiration of the sixty-six books of the Bible and only the sixty-six books of the Bible. He argued strenuously for the fact that the canon was closed at the end of the apostolic era. It’s rather interesting that one of the fullest treatments he had of that is at the end of a sermon lecture which has never yet been published. He gave a series of sermons on 1 Corinthians 13. Part of that series has been published under the title “Charity and Its Fruits,”

Transcript - CH504 The Theology of Jonathan Edwards © 2015 Christian University GlobalNet. All rights reserved.


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and it does contain indirectly and more by suggestion than by immediate exposition his thinking about the canon, but it’s the exposition of 1 Corinthians 13:8–13, which is still located in Beinecke Library at Yale in manuscript form and has never yet seen the light of publication, where we find his much fuller argument for the cessation of the charismata and the cessation of special revelation altogether.

They had a problem in the eighteenth century that’s not unknown in the twentieth century about people who had tricky ways, almost unconsciously, of adding to the Scripture without even being conscious of so doing. A favorite thing against which Edwards inveighed in the eighteenth century was for people to open the Bible and insist that whatever their eyes fell upon had a particular relevance to them and would even direct them what they should do, and Edwards’s fundamental criticism was that the Bible means what it teaches, and your job is to find out what it said to its own generation and then apply it, but not to take God’s words to Abraham about leaving his home country and going elsewhere, that you were to do the same. Or because Philip approached an Ethiopian eunuch, you weren’t supposed to do something similar. That type of thing was known in that day, and it was something that troubled Edwards a great deal, but he labored strenuously on the fact that supernatural revelation had accomplished its purpose when Holy Scripture was finished, the canon is closed, and any effort to open it is a violation of the will of God. But on the other hand, and this is what we come to in the burden of this concluding message about Edwards and inspiration, the way in which we’re to understand the Bible, we would today call the hermeneutical question, how interpretation and illumination are to take place was a subject which also attracted Edwards and drew forth some of his finest reflections on the subject.

We see now that we have a divine, supernatural revelation, miraculously inspired so that every word is inerrant and its canonical limits are defined as well. It remains this purpose for which it was given understanding and applying it. This was the hermeneutical question, par excellence, and hermeneutics is probably the most central issue in the biblical question of our own time. With respect to the interpretation of the Bible and I remind you once again every sermon that Jonathan Edwards ever preached was nothing more or less than an interpretation and application of the Bible. In the very beginning of his life he was determined to know that Bible, and no genius, I would say, in the whole history of mankind has ever applied his mind so



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intensely and so extensively through the entire duration of his career than Jonathan Edwards, so we have the very great fortune, I say that, I often hear people say they almost shed tears because this man didn’t go into science or didn’t go into philosophy and wasted his time, as it were, being a preacher and so on, well, thank God Jonathan Edwards wasted his time being an expositor of the Word of God. It’s my personal opinion that no one has appeared in the history of the church since the canon was closed who’s understood the Bible more deeply, more accurately, more profoundly, and more practically than Jonathan Edwards. Judge what you please about this, but let’s pay attention now to what he does understand about interpretation and illumination in the meaning of Holy Scripture.

In a sense he was dealing with interpretation all his life. All his notes and all his writings were directly or indirectly involved in that enterprise. We’ve never encountered a sermon which didn’t begin, as I say, with a text and consists of an exposition of it. Most of the books for which he’s famous he almost always preached beforehand from his pulpit. They underwent certain academic changes in his library, but at the same time, Religious Affections was a series of sermons. History of Redemption was a series of sermons. Freedom of the Will was not a series of sermons, but many parts of the Freedom of the Will I can recognize from sermons which I have read that his ideas are developed. And Miscellanies, which is the most important corpus which is largely unpublished to this day, frequently represented his profoundest thought was lifted bodily on the Miscellanies notebooks into sermonic material and likewise paragraphs were taken from sermons and put in and developed in Miscellanies, so you can say in a certain sense, the entire literary output of Jonathan Edwards was one grand commentary on the Bible. He didn’t write a single commentary on the Bible. What Stine calls a commentary on Revelation was not technically a commentary. It came the closest he ever did, but in a certain sense, Jonathan Edwards never wrote a commentary on a single book of the Bible and yet his whole life was a commentary on the whole Bible.

Any students who happen to be listening to this tape, any of you seminary students, I put this out as a challenge to you as one of the most needed things in the realm of Edwardsian research. I’ve thrown it out a good many times and somebody may be working on it by now, but I don’t know, but I think one of the most useful things would be to put together every comment Jonathan Edwards ever made on any particular text in the Bible. There’d



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be very, very few passages where he didn’t make a comment. Many of them he preached on. All of his sermons, as I say, were exegetical sermons. But the putting them all together—his sermons, his Bible notes, his treatises, everything, including his correspondence and so on that contributed to his understanding of a biblical text I think would take a good five volumes and would be an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the Bible as well as Edwardsian research. You’ll virtually have to wait, however; I may say you young students can do this, I can’t, until the Yale University Press Edition is finished and you have just about . . . published everything, including all of his sermons and so on. And some can’t come before the twenty-first century, I’m sure, but at the same time when it comes, some of you ought to be ready to . . . in the meantime, you can get a great deal of it done and aim toward a what I would predict would be a five-volume commentary of Jonathan Edwards on Holy Scripture in that particular manner.

Probably the most straightforward comprehensive statement that Edwards ever made about the Bible, its interpretation, and its divinity is found in a miscellany which was written shortly after he had begun his preaching career. We have referred to it before, alluded to it, but now let me quote it in full. It’s under the heading of Scripture. See, this is the way the Miscellanies were written. He’d write the word Sabbath; he’d write the word Church Government; he’d write the word Millennium; he’d write a word like this one, Scriptures, or Unpardonable Sin. See, it’s just a miscellaneous writing down of his thoughts. You’ve all heard about the fact that when he went for recreation he’d ride on his horse and had thoughts as he rode along and he’d pin pieces of paper on his coat to remember those thoughts and write them down when he got back home again, so he’d often looked as if he’d been in a snowstorm when he got home again, but Edwards would determine not to lose any of his thoughts. And if they didn’t go into a sermon or something else, they would go into his Miscellanies.

Here’s one of his miscellanies, very early, entitled “Scriptures.” “When one inquires whether or not we have Scripture ground for any doctrine, the question is whether or not the scriptural exposition exhibits in any way to the eye of the mind or to the eye of reason. We have no grounds to assert that that was God’s intent by Scripture in so many terms to declare every doctrine that He would have us believe. There are many things that Scripture may support that we know already. And if what the Scripture



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says together with what is plain to reason leads us to believe any doctrine, we are to look upon ourselves as taught this doctrine by the Scripture. God may reveal things in Scripture which way He pleases. If by what He there reveals the thing is any way clearly discovered to the understanding or the eye of the mind, tis our duty to receive it as His revelation.”

It seems to me several things seem worthy of note here. First, no specific hermeneutical principle is advocated, whether it literal, allegorical, eschatological, or anagogical. The question is only, please note, whether or not the Scripture exhibits it [in] any way to the eye of the mind. Presumably any type of interpretation is valid if reasonable as the manifest intent of Holy Scripture. No special disposition, regenerate or unregenerate, is insisted on. Furthermore, second, what is plain to reason, together with what Scripture teaches, justify doctrine. This seems to be more than the usual just and necessary consequent of the Westminster Confession of Faith. What is plain to reason would seem to include not only the implicit but the self-evident, and soundly reasoned extrabiblical data as well. In Freedom of the Will Edwards had justified metaphysic as virtually the only way of understanding, as I mentioned the other day, and justifying any cardinal biblical principle, specifically the points of Calvinism.

Third, whatever the Bible is found to teach “tis our duty to receive it as His [God’s] revelation.” “Whatever” is an omnibus term which carries authority for every single item which the understanding sees the Bible to affirm. There’s no room for restriction to the normative, to the essential, to matters pertaining to faith and morals; this is an absolute equivalent with a classic formula: what the Bible says, God says. Also it’s a matter duty to receive it, and for Edwards this means preach and practice it. This sentence can explain his entire life and career, and he did preach as hardly anybody has done without shrinking from the whole counsel of God. I remember in The Institutes where Calvin deals with this particular point. He had to spend most of his time persuading people who believe the Bible to proclaim the Bible, and obviously if a person believes the Bible’s the Word of God and this is what the Bible says, and it doesn’t behoove the messenger to tell the one who sent him what he will declare to mankind, and Edwards, of course, was obedient to that conviction, and he did preach the Word of God as he understood it and made it as relevant as he could to those who heard it from his lips.



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In addition to the metaphorical underpinning of interpretation, there’s also a superstructure which Edwards calls the “double sense of Scripture.” This “double sense” is called “Manifold Instruction” in another miscellany, which I will not take time to read here. In some cases the human speakers or writers do not themselves understand that illusion or double sense. “Divine revelation is like a light that shines in a dark place” is the theme of a sermon which develops this point. You see, the light is there, but it’s coming into darkness and it’s only after a while that it penetrates that darkness.

Edwards was a literalist in one sense of the word. He explained that letters, however, are useless except as they relate to ideas. So the Old Testament dispensation was unprofitable except as it referred to the Spirit which the New Testament is the minister of. Second Corinthians 3:17 says “that the Lord is the Spirit,” which means that Christ is the spiritual meaning of the Old Testament, and so on. And many people feel that if a person says what Edwards says here, he’s backing off from inerrancy. I’ve read a good many treatises trying to prove that Calvin didn’t defend inerrancy because he did insist it was the meaning that counted. Edwards is saying the same thing. What has been made perfectly plain to you, has it not, that he certainly believed that every word was the Word of God. But at the same time the word means something, and it’s the job of the reader, particularly the minister, but all readers, to understand what that word means. The word has no magic in itself; it’s what it conveys, but that’s so far from backing away from verbal inspiration into a kind of broad, vague meaning interpretation, and it’s simply saying that we literalists, if you’re going to call us that, mean that the words, the letters, have to be understood for what they mean. And nobody’s thinking that just because he has focused on the word, that would be a function of higher criticism, but he has the message of Scripture, but he’s got to let the Scripture say what the words do actually say. He’s got to understand the interpretation accurately. . . . Scripture must have free course in him if he is indeed to be a faithful expositor of it.

According to Edwards, the Old Testament was a typological dispensation. He is a literalist in his interpretation even here—literalist in the sense that I’ve given it, you understand. This is the sense in which everyone is a literalist. And his literalism has to refer in the first place the very letters or words of the document. When one turns to these words, he finds ideas, says Edwards. These ideas relate either to a literal or other meaning in the words, and he gives examples of that from a tabernacle and elsewhere, but



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what he’s trying to say at this point is that as he understands the Old Testament, and he does say incidentally as an aside, probably the most difficult problem in biblical interpretation is a precise and accurate understanding of the relation between the Old and the New Testament. But when he’s commenting on this particular point here he’s saying very clearly you must first of all focus on the words and then get the meaning, and then when you do get the meaning, that richer meaning which penetrates the darkness, is pointing to the New Testament church, and as we’ll see later as we discuss the millennium to the last days even beyond the era of New Testament final revelation.

Typology is everywhere in Edwards. He’s full of it. I’ll take a random sample from his notes on Scripture, which is another body of literature which he produced and will be edited and given to us in a final edition sometime by the Yale University Press. He says, “The very first verse of the Bible on which we have a note is Genesis 1:2,” and this is what he reads, “The earth was without form and void.” “The first state,” he writes, “of the earth or this lower world shows what it was to be afterwards; that is, a world of confusion and emptiness, full of evil, vanity of vanities so in the first state of man in his infancy is an image of what man always is in himself—a poor, polluted, helpless worm.” Now you may not get all of the overtones of that statement, but you will when we come to his doctrine of man a little bit later, but you at least see that while Edwards addresses himself in the first case to what Genesis 1:2 actually says, what the word means at that . . . sense, that penetration of the darkness and so on is a reference far beyond the mere creation to an intimation of what man is in his inmost being.

His preaching was typological too. He has a great many sermons developing that point. One I might mention in passing here, a very interesting one, about these beggars, you know, outside the gates of Samaria when the Assyrians were waiting to storm it the next day, and these wretched beggars say, “If we stay here, they won’t let us inside. We’re going to die. If we go over to the Assyrian camp, they’ll probably put us to death, but they may not.” So you know how the story does go; they decide to go to the camp, and they discover that the army has left and they fall heir to all of the spoils and so on. The sermon that Edwards makes after doing full justice to the historical literacy of the matter, no question at all about it being historical verity at all, but still he points out this sort of double sense, this penetration of the darkness, to a picture of a man as he is in a fallen condition. If he doesn’t do anything



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he’s going to die forever. If he seeks Christ, he may find Him and he may not. But one thing’s certain, if he stays where he is outside the gates of Samaria, he’s going to die. If he goes looking for something, he may find life, and indeed if he comes to Christ he will find life, but that’s the kind of freedom Edwards takes. Not saying that is necessarily what it meant, but saying that does indeed fit into the overall picture of the Bible and undoubtedly was part of the double sense of it.

A word about Edwards and the way illumination, which his favorite word for that, or understanding of the real meaning of the Bible took place. While the internal evidence and a corroborative external evidence he feels proves the Bible is the Word of God, this fact is brought home to the understanding by what Edwards liked to call divine illumination. The way to know that the Spirit of God was given to Christ is to have Him, as he says quaintly, “given to you.” No other book but the Word of Christ reaches the heart. This fact shows that the internal miracle of illumination is a kind of external evidence also. Only the Word of God can “subdue the heart.”

Edwards obviously agrees with the Westminster Confession, which after listing many biblical arguments says, “The arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God” carefully adds a significant reminder that “yet not withstanding our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.” Edwards was a great admirer of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and though he doesn’t quote this particular citation I’ve just given, in this connection it’s quite clear that his thinking is the same. He has a case for the inspiration—internal and external—and he points out that no matter how powerful the argument for the inspiration of the Bible is, you will never be persuaded or assured of it except by the immediate testimony of the Holy Spirit, a doctrine for which John Calvin is famous and a doctrine with which Jonathan Edwards concurred quite completely.

The understanding of it as the Word of God, as a thing of joy, of delight, of beauty, an excellent thing, that is something that the mind of man as such can never say that has to be as a result of divine illumination of the person reading it, and God is absolutely sovereign as to whether He will vouchsafe that gift of illumination or not. Anybody can pick up the Bible and read it and understand it, but only God can enable him to understand it with the eyes of faith, welcome it as a truth of God, see in it nothing less than



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the image of Jesus Christ Himself. The devil may have speculative knowledge. Edwards labors this point quite frequently, but such speculative knowledge as the devil or devilish human beings, and so which was possible for unregenerate men, he says, “Nothing in the mind of man, that is of the same nature with what the devils experience or are the subjects of, is any sure sign of saving grace.” Let me read that again, a famous sermon of his on James 2. “Nothing in the mind of man, that is of the same nature with what the devils experience or are the subjects of, is any sure sign of saving grace.”

Now see what Edwards develops in that sermon is that the devil knows very well what the Bible teaches. He’s quite orthodox in his understanding. He twists it and distorts it, but not because of ignorance, but because of malice, but he understands it, but what he doesn’t have is any taste for it, any love of it, and delight of it when it comes to understanding. Now what Edwards is pointing out, as James has stressed here or rather the Spirit of God stressed through James, is a warning to men that though they can’t be saved without the knowledge of Christ or the Bible, they can have a knowledge of the Bible without being saved or illumined. You can be an expert in theology.

I may warn you people who are taking these tapes here that you may be an absolute expert and one of the best theologians the church has ever had and be a reprobate soul, be dead in trespasses and sin, be blind as a bat spiritually. Edwards would say that to you because this gift of illumination is something that devils don’t have and unregenerate people can’t have. It doesn’t incapacitate them for understanding the Bible. Many people err in this area, especially conservative people, especially we who are inerrantists and so and have a tendency to suppose that unless you are born again you can’t understand the Bible. That’s fiction. You can understand it, but unless you’re born again, it won’t be welcome to you. And the reason you get so much distortion and false exposition by unconverted people is not that they’re not competent, but they’re not willing. Their hearts are not submissive, and the reason is they’ve never been illumined. Their natural heart is like the devil’s—capable of understanding but determined to resist and so on, and so Edwards is reminding us here, as Westminster’s Confession did, the absolute indispensability of this divine illumination in the truth of Scripture.



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What’s the function of the Spirit in illuminating the minds of men savingly? “He,” says Edwards, “helps us to receive the revelation of the Word.” Men hear of the loveliness of Christ, but until they receive illumination, “they have no taste or relish that sweetness any more than an image of stone could taste honey if you should put it in its mouth. The Spirit does not,” Edwards, quoting Stoddard, says, “reveal new truth not revealed in the Word. The Spirit’s communication is not a ‘secret whisper’; that is, it’s not the imparting of new propositions. It’s the divine and supernatural light, which is not only light, not only knowledge, it’s actually awareness of the divinity and the supernaturalness of that light.” The beauty or the excellency or another favorite word of Edwards, the amiableness of this knowledge is not seen by natural reason until the divine and supernatural light reveals it to the natural reason.

I keep stressing that to point out to you that according to Jonathan Edwards the reason, you see, not only can grasp the truth, but it’s the only instrument you have for grasping the truth. At the same time, the reason of itself will never see the divinity of that truth. Only the Spirit of God by a direct communication. Not of new truth, not of information, not of postcanonical revelation. No, but of the nature of that, the spirituality of it, the loveliness of it, that . . . see, in other words, first of all, you’ve got the truth for the natural reason, and at this point a Christian and a non-Christian stand on the same ground. The non-Christian may be far more capable as a matter of fact as an exegete. Generally speaking God’s given more brains to the unsaved than to the saved. Generally speaking they’re sharper. Not many wise are called and so on, but here the believer and the unbeliever stand before the same Bible, and they can both understand it, with the unbeliever being likely better to understand it, but he will never ever see that it’s God’s own beauty and excellency that’s there any more than the devil. Just as James said, “They believe in God and they tremble,” but they don’t ever see God as a person of beauty and loveliness to whom they are attracted. And so it is, he says, with respect to men.

The divine and supernatural light is the theme of many sermons because the sight of the glory of God in Christ is that thing and that only which changes the elect of God and makes them like God. One sermon. “There never was any man,” Edwards says in another sermon, “that once came to understand what matter of one Christ was, but his heart was infallibly drawn to it.” In still another sermon he affirms that true love and knowledge of God assimilates to God and makes man a partaker of His nature. There’s



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also “a spiritual understanding of divine things which all natural and unregenerate men are destitute of. Spiritual knowledge was above all knowledge that the wicked could ever have.”

It’s because of the nature this spiritual knowledge that Edwards can write, “There is none that teaches like God.” There are four ways mentioned in which human teachers are inferior to God: none can impart the will to do what it’s taught, none can impart a knowledge so excellent, none can teach so effectually, none can make the disciple love what he hated. It’s a sober thing for us to remember, and here again, I’m fully aware that laymen will be listening to these tapes and I hope to God that they’ll get the message from it, but particularly ministers and seminarians who are listening to it, this is a reminder to all of us that though we should be the best possible teachers, we are incapable, utterly incapable, totally incapable of making persons love what we’re saying or having their hearts changed by the efficacy of our proclamation. In our case, it’s only the singer, never the song that they could be attracted to by us. Being attracted to the song we sing, the gospel we preach, that is in the hands of God and God alone, according to Jonathan Edwards.

In spite of the close relation, however, between the divine light and doctrinal knowledge, this light was not primarily intellectual but affectional. While the intellectual was a necessary foundation of this vision, the vision was more than intellectual. What exactly it was Edwards makes abundantly clear. It was the sight of the amiableness of the divine attributes, the moral attributes. Not so much how great thou art as how moral thou art, though the greatness would be recognized, as we’ll notice when we talk about the doctrine of God more particularly, but God is not truly great unless He’s moral, and He’s not an attractive being to us unless He is indeed the quintessence of virtue. The attributes could not be understood apart from this divine light, not as attractive, but their amiableness could not be understood apart from it. Devils could have a knowledge of the attributes but not of their beauty. Only the godly have, he says, a “sensible apprehension of the main themes of the gospel.”

Preaching on 2 Corinthians 2:14, Edwards discusses this saving experience not in terms of light but of smell in consonance with the text itself: “The spiritual knowledge of Christ is as it were a sweet savor that the soul has of Christ.” Five points of resemblance for the olefactory experience are noted. First in smelling it is good, an excellent nature of the object that is perceived. Second, in smelling we have an immediate perception of the good. Third,



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“in smelling or tasting a sweet savor, a knowledge or an idea is obtained of the excellency of a thing perfectly diverse in its nature and kind of all that can be obtained any other way.” Fourth, if we have a savor, the good perceived is perceived as excellent, and fifth, this experience necessarily implies approbation and therein differs from mere speculation. Approbation and not mere speculation. It reminds me of a later . . . that statement reminds me of a later Edwardsian, the famous W. G. T. Shedd, one of the great Reformed theologians of the turn of the century who taught at Union Seminary in New York when it was still a Presbyterian and Reformed institution, while Charles Hodge was teaching at Princeton and the great Baptist theologian A. H. Strong at Rochester in New York.

Shedd had a sermon entitled “The Approbation of Good Is Not Necessarily the Love of It.” And that’s as an Edwardsian statement as you can get. The approbation of good or the good is not necessarily a love of it. The unregenerate person can see the good. He can even approve of it. Someone has said, you know, that hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue. Every fallen sinner knows that he ought not to be a sinner. They all know what virtue is and that they ought to be virtuous. They all approve it officially in their mask of hypocrisy, but in their hearts, they don’t love it. That comes, you see, not from the mind . . . even when the mind understands the fundamental moral excellence of a given concept. Since it doesn’t love it, it basically repudiates it, but it cannot do that overtly and officially, but invariably as hypocrisy pays its tribute to virtue approves it. The approbation of the good, the approbation of God is not the love of the good and it’s not the love of God.

Not only is the divine light more than speculative knowledge, but it is necessary for fully correct speculative knowledge. Let me repeat again somewhat ad nauseam because this is such an important element in Jonathan Edwards: There is no such thing as true saving knowledge that is not speculative in the first place. At the same time no one insisted more vigorously than Jonathan Edwards what I’m saying now, that divine light is more than speculative knowledge, and now he goes on to this other thought that it’s necessary for fully correct speculative knowledge. This goes back to something we were mentioning earlier. The devil and devilish human beings of superior intellect can very well grasp better than a pious saint may what the Word of God says, but because he hates it, he denigrates it, he twists it, he tries to eradicate it. So if there’s going to be any full development of correct



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speculative knowledge—please get that, correct speculative knowledge—it’s going to come from a person who has had the transcendental divine illumination, even though that person may be as far as speculative capacity is concerned inferior to the other individual. The inferior person will welcome this truth, he’ll seek it, he’ll develop it, he’ll find out as much as he can about it, he’ll tell it faithfully and so on; whereas a superior intellect will be using all of his superior mind to push it away, to drive it into the corner, to hide it under the rug, to distort it as much as he possibly can.

So Edwards points out that this divine light, this sweet taste is necessary even for correct speculative knowledge also. This point is not extensively developed in Edwards, and many of his remarks such as those concerning excellent speculative knowledge of the devils seem opposed to it; however, the manuscript sermon on Matthew 13:23 speaks of the new judgments of the godly as they see in the Word the “intrinsic signatures of divinity.” The unconverted never see that. They’re written all over the pages of Scripture, according to Edwards, but only those who are illumined by the Holy Spirit see the intrinsic signatures of deity. I quote him here: “There are signatures of divine majesty to be seen in the Word and signatures of divine wisdom and of divine holiness and of the evident marks of divine grace that make it evident that the Word of God did proceed from a divine majesty and wisdom and holiness and grace. There are as proper manifestations of divinity in the speech of God as there are manifestations of humanity in the speech of man. God opens the understandings of profitable hearers to see these signatures and manifestations of His divinity so that they hear it as the Word of God. They do as it were hear God speak.”

Illumination is dependent on knowledge. Knowledge is not dependent in the same sense on illumination. Illumination does powerfully promote knowledge. Once God has made the knowledge come alive spiritually, the saints develop an eager desire for more of such knowledge in order that more enlivening experience may be possible. The sense of the heart, guess I may say incidentally, is what first intrigued Perry Miller with Jonathan Edwards apparently. He has a special essay on the sense of the heart and so on. But here’s Edwards saying that the sense of the heart promotes the interest of the head—spiritual saving knowledge of God and divine things greatly promotes speculative knowledge as it engages the mind in its search into things of this kind and much assist to a distinct understanding of it.

Transcript - CH504 The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

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Doctrine of the Scriptures, Part 2Lesson 04 of 24

Other things being equal, they that have spiritual knowledge are much more likely than others to have a good doctrinal acquaintance with things of religion. But Edwards hastens to add that “such acquaintance may be no distinguishing character of the true saints.” Edwards never wants anybody for one moment to think he’s a Christian just because he’s orthodox. Edwards is a great champion of orthodoxy, meticulous orthodoxy, but he’s an even greater champion of the proposition that anybody who thinks because he’s orthodox he’s a Christian is grossly mistaken. The devils are orthodox. They hate orthodoxy and they know what it is, but they hate it. You can’t be a Christian without being orthodox, but you can be orthodox without being a Christian, and while this man is constantly extolling the value of true doctrinal knowledge, he is equally constantly warning people against the supposition that because they possess that, they, therefore, possess Jesus Christ.

Let me therefore in the last minute or two of this tape give a brief summary statement of Jonathan Edwards on Holy Scripture. What shall we say? For him, Scripture was nothing other than the verbally inspired, inerrant Word, and he always as Isaiah advised trembled at God’s Word. It had free course in him as he studied it day and night and preached it throughout his ministry. It was certified internally and confirmed by external credentials as well. It was, he says, “an awful book with its dreadful warnings to the wicked and wondrous promises to the humble penitent.” So Edwards [was] boxed in—Peter Gay’s statement at Princeton—Edwards, boxed in as he was by its authority, preached it in season and out of season, laboring to make its unique and saving message plain and powerful while fully aware that no sinner in Northampton or anywhere would ever see and receive it as God’s very Word until God Himself cast His divine and supernatural light upon its pages and proclamation.

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards LESSON 04 of 24 · thank God Jonathan Edwards wasted his time being an expositor of the Word of God. It’s my personal opinion that no one has

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