Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 10 | WJE)
Overview
This volume presents the complete texts of twenty-three sermons preached by Jonathan Edwards during the first years of his career. The sermons, which have never been printed before, document one of the least explored periods of this eminent theologian’s life and thought. Fully annotated, they are accompanied by an editor’s preface that combines new information with fresh readings of related texts, such as the “Diary” and “Personal Narrative.”
The volume includes a general introduction that puts Edwards’ thirty-five years of writing and preaching into a broad literary and historical context. Based on the study of his entire sermon corpus—including over seventy printed sermons and twelve hundred sermon manuscripts—as well as related notebooks, letters, and treatises, the introduction enables readers to understand the elaborate network of working papers through which Edwards evolved his thought, as well as the critical function of the sermon in testing and developing expression of that thought. The introduction also explores the literary context of Edwards’ writing, especially relating to the theory and practice of homiletics.
Top Highlights
“Second. Never act anymore as if you were your own. You must consider that in giving yourself to God, you have cast off all pretenses to a right in yourself, and if you go afterwards to act as if you were your own, you thereby deny what you [have] done. You give and take away again: you have given all your powers and faculties to God, and yet you take them and make use of them as if they were your own. If you don’t give yourself to God entirely, it is not worth your while to pretend to give yourself to him at all; for he will accept of no other self-dedication but what is entire. For what do you mean by giving yourself to God except devoting all your powers to him, to be used entirely for him and not for yourself, to act for the time to come as his and not as your own?” (Pages 559–560)
“Reasonable beings, while they act as such, naturally choose those things which they are convinced are best for them, and will certainly do those things which they know they had better do than leave undone.” (Page 296)
“Now most that read or hear this remarkable history will doubtless acknowledge that, if such a catastrophe was to happen to every man’s estate, it would be enough quite to wean him from the world. Almost every man will doubtless say that, if they knew they should lose all their great estate and be deprived entirely of all their outward prosperity, as Job was, they would entertain no thought of striving and laying themselves out for a great estate in the world, seeing they must certainly in this manner be deprived of it, and they know not how soon. If it were so, men would not be so eager and earnest after riches, but would strive only for that that they could not be deprived of; all will grant [that] it would not be worth the while to do more.” (Pages 403–404)
Wilson H. Kimnach is Emeritus Presidential Professor in the Humanities at the University of Bridgeport. He has been associated with the editorial committee of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, based at Yale University, for more than twenty years.