The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 23: The "Miscellanies", 1153–1360
Overview
Throughout his ministerial career, Jonathan Edwards filled a series of private notebooks on a wide variety of theological topics, numbering his entries—nearly 1,400 of them—in sequence. With the publication of this, the fourth and final volume of miscellanies, readers have access for the first time to the most comprehensive printed edition of Edwards’ “Miscellanies,” the most controversial and commonly cited of his sets of private notebooks and his most sustained, serious effort to rough out his theological reflections. Edwards began the nine-book series in 1722, while still in his late teens, and added to it throughout his last thirty-five prolific years. As one who thought “with his pen in his hand,” he used these intellectual workbooks to extend and clarify his ideas about an exceptionally wide range of issues and themes.
The entries in this volume cover the years from 1751 to 1758, a period during which Edwards faced a variety of difficult challenges while working at the Stockbridge Indian mission and served a short-lived presidency at Princeton, then known as the College of New Jersey. In these entries Edwards grapples with modern naturalism, critiques “generous doctrines,” and attempts to bolster Reformed thought in the face of the Enlightenment. Through his meditations and argumentations, as well as his engagement with some of the chief religious and philosophical figures of the age, Edwards emerges as a thinker determined to put reason at the service of revelation.
Top Highlights
“God may have a true, proper and real delight, and so a part of his happiness, in seeing the state of the creature, in seeing its happy state, as he may delight in the exercise of his own goodness, and so in gratifying the inclination of his own heart, and yet all his happiness be eternal and immutable. For he eternally has this disposition, and eternally sees and enjoys this future gratification of it as though it were present. And, indeed, all things are present to him; with him is no succession, no past and future. And he is independent in this delight. He brings the thing to pass by which he is gratified by his own, independent power.” (Page 138)
“To know or acknowledge God, worship and serve him, be subject to him and keep his words or rules in their hearts and practice, was the proper expression of receiving Jehovah as their God and Savior, or uniting themselves to him as his people, and receiving him as their spiritual husband, captain and Redeemer. This was a real and effectual doing of it, and is plainly and abundantly revealed to be the condition of God’s covenant in this manner, it being no other than voluntarily and by their own act becoming his people and putting themselves under his care as their prince and Savior.” (Page 521)
“These4 things show the ceremonial law not to be immutable, and are intimations that it one day was to be wholly abolished, to give place to the moral reason of things on the great change to be made in the days of the gospel, when all nations should be God’s people.” (Page 125)
“having accomplished the most complete redemption and happiness of all his elect people.” (Page 239)
About Douglas A. Sweeney
Douglas A. Sweeney is Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.