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Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards, circa 1750-55. Corbis
By Fr. Robert P. Imbelli
Jonathan Edwards, acclaimed by many today as America's greatest theologian, entered what would become Yale College in 1716, at the age of 13, a Puritan, his heritage animated by religious fervor and domestic intimacy, frontier hardship and intellectual ferment, the discernment of spirits and the acute awareness of mortality. At Yale, Edwards immersed himself in the writings of such enlightened pioneers of the new scientific and philosophical age as Isaac Newton and John Locke. It would become Edwards's lifelong adventure to forge a synthesis between the new natural philosophy and biblical revelation as mediated by his Calvinist tradition. His abiding achievement was to reject neither, but to see that each, in different ways, conveys intimations of God's sovereign presence. In the words of biographer George Marsden, Edwards became "simultaneously a strict conservative and an innovator."
For some intellectuals at the time, Enlightenment thought spelled an absent deity, one who had set the universe in motion and left it to its own devices. But Edwards claimed that the Triune God of Christian tradition freely creates and continuously sustains his handiwork, that the universe shines forth as an "explosion of God's Glory," enrapturing anyone with eyes to see. More than a century later, a like perception inspired the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to exclaim: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God!"
Learning to perceive God's glory ever more clearly, said Edwards, was each believer's calling; the minister's pastoral responsibility was to promote this gracious perception. Such seeing concerned neither the mind alone nor only the heart, but both. Edwards would not settle for the "either/or" of a stolid rationalism or an effervescent pietism. His spiritual integrity required, in Cardinal John Henry Newman's terms, "notional apprehension" and "real apprehension," both cognitive understanding and personal appropriation. Edwards's pastoral labors to foster real apprehension sparked that spiritual explosion with which he is forever associated: the Great Awakening.
In his most famous work, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Edwards defends the validity of the revival he launched to its rationalist detractors. True religion, he says, entails "fervent exercises of the heart." The Scriptures "do everywhere place religion very much in the affections," and in particular, in the experiences of love and joy. Tellingly, Edwards prefaced his treatise with a quotation from the First Letter of Peter: "Though you have not seen Christ, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy" (1 Pet 1:8).
Here is the heart of Edwards's vision. The beauty of God shines out from Jesus Christ. God's glory is most manifest in Christ's redemptive and restorative love. From this Christic center, the whole creation receives orientation and purpose. The universe shows itself to be not a chance congeries of atoms in motion but a theater for the emergence of spiritual persons in life-enriching relation with one another.
In the accents of his time, Edwards echoes the founding narratives of Genesis and John: "In the beginning was the Word. . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory." And it is the perennial pastoral-theological task to re-echo this same Good News ever and again, in a way both faithfully conservative and creatively innovative. For the pastoral mission is, in every generation, to wed hearts and minds to Jesus Christ, "in a pure disinterested love to Christ and desire of his glory."
I remembered Edwards as I read the homily that Sean O'Malley, OFM Cap, preached at his installation as archbishop of Boston. Amid phrases poignant and repentant, joyful and trusting, appeared this striking affirmation: "Despite the sins and the failing of priests and bishops and the crimes of Catholics over 2,000 years, Christ is with his Church. Christ is the bridegroom, not the widower." When the last clergy abuse lawsuit is finally settled and preventive policies are firmly in place, when needed structural changes in parish and diocesan pastoral bodies are implemented and real consultation among laity, clergy, and bishops becomes a matter of course, the Catholic Church will only have arrived at the threshold of awakening and renewal. As Jonathan Edwards knew and taught, when the Bridegroom asks the decisive question, "Do you love me?" the answer cannot be mouthed by a surrogate. At the moment of crisis and choice, we each stand personally accountable.
Fr. Robert P. Imbelli is an associate professor of theology at Boston College. For more on Edwards, he recommends George M. Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003) and A Jonathan Edwards Reader (John E. Smith, et al., ed., 1995).
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