A Taste of Edwards (1)

Jonathan Edwards dared to say it. He was a warm and yet very firm preacher of the Word of God, eager to please God rather than to speak according to what people wanted to hear. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the well-known theologians in the English-speaking world, famous for his thoughts about experiential theology. Although quite a few of our readers are familiar with his writings, I would like to introduce him to you as a writer well worth being read in our days. We live in a time in which many are enemies of true experiential life, and on the other hand in a time of unbiblical spirituality. I find Jonathan Edwards remarkably valuable for the readers of our Banner of Truth.

I would like to introduce his book entitled Religious Affections, and I would like to do so in four articles in which I let him speak and I only add a few comments myself. The portions are called: “A Foot Too High,” “Heart and Head,” “Receiving Texts,” and “No Additions to the Bible.”

A Foot Too High

I do not know who used this expression first, but the saying that our religion could be situated a foot too high is a well-known expression in our congregations, especially in the Netherlands. Our heads are a foot higher in our bodies than is our heart, and if our religion remains in our heads and does not touch the heart, it is situated too high. How important this truth still is today. Oh, may it please the Lord to cause the truth which is preached every Sunday to sink down into our hearts. When the Holy Spirit works in us, we become highly affected, deeply wounded, hungry for God Himself. True religion is not a mere persuasion that the Bible is true, for it goes much deeper and comes to the emotions. Would people not cry out for God and feel themselves to be ungodly ones when the Lord opens their understanding?

Here is the first part of what I would like you to read, hoping that you will pick up the book yourselves in order to read more of it.

“If the great things of religion are rightly understood, they will affect the heart. The reason why men are not affected by such infinitely great, important, glorious, and wonderful things, as they often hear and read of in the Word of God, is undoubtedly because they are blind. If they were not so, it would be impossible, and utterly inconsistent with human nature, that their hearts should be otherwise than strongly impressed and greatly moved by such things.

“This manner of slighting all religious affections is the way exceedingly to harden the hearts of men, and to encourage them in their stupidity and senselessness, and to keep them in a state of spiritual death as long as they live, and bring them at last to death eternal. The prevailing prejudice against religious affections at this day, in the land, is apparently of awful effect to harden the hearts of sinners, and damp the graces of many of the saints, and stun the life and power of religion, and preclude the effect of ordinances, and hold us down in a state of dullness and apathy. It undoubtedly causes many persons greatly to offend God in entertaining mean and low thoughts of the extraordinary work He has lately wrought in this land.

“And for persons to despise and cry down all religious affections is the way to shut all religion out of their own hearts, and to make thorough work in ruining their souls.

“They who condemn high affections in others are certainly not likely to have high affections themselves. And let it be considered, that they who have but little religious affections have certainly but little religion. And they who condemn others for their religious affections, and have none themselves, have no religion.

“There are false affections, and there are true. A man's having much affection does not prove that he has any true religion: but if he has no affection, it proves that he has no true religion. The right way is not to reject all affections, nor to approve all, but to distinguish between affections, approving some and rejecting others; separating between the wheat and the chaff, the gold and the dross, the precious and the vile.” (Part I, page 50, Banner of Truth Trust edition.)

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