God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (With the Complete Text of The End for Which God Created the World)
272
God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (With the Complete Text of The End for Which God Created the World)
272Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781581347456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2006 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was a pastor, theologian, and missionary. He is generally considered the greatest American theologian. A prolific writer, Edwards is known for his many sermons, including "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and his classic A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Edwards was appointed president of the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) shortly before his death.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE END FOR WHICH GOD CREATED THE WORLD WHY PUBLISH AN OLD BOOK?
A Personal and Public Concern
The message of Jonathan Edwards in The End for Which God Created the World is an intensely personal concern for me and a word of great public significance. In that book, a vision of God is displayed that took me captive thirty years ago and has put its stamp on every part of my life and ministry. But, more important than my own experience, is the immense significance of Edwards's vision of God for the wider public of our day.
SECTION ONE
An American Tragedy Jonathan Edwards is one of the great fathers of evangelical Christianity in America. But it is a great tragedy, as Mark Noll observes, that "the theocentric emphasis of Edwards has played a remarkably small role in the history of evangelical Protestants." There are reasons for this. Partly it is because our whole culture is inhospitable to such a radically God-centered vision of life. Noll argues that since Edwards's day 250 years ago,
evangelicals have not thought about life from the ground up as Christians, because their entire culture has ceased to do so. Edwards's piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards's perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.
Unsurpassed in Theological Grandeur
This is why the publication of The End for Which God Created the World is a cultural, religious, and evangelical concern. Edwards's book (together with True Virtue), Noll suggests, is "perhaps the best place to encounter both the breathtaking vision of divine glory and the human strain required to take in that vision." I agree. So does David Brand in his book, Profile of the Last Puritan. The End for Which God Created the World, he says, is "a work which I have come to regard as unsurpassed in terms of its theological grandeur."
My prayer is that the evangelical church today would stand in awe of the "breath-taking vision of divine glory" declared with "theological grandeur" in The End for Which God Created the World. This is one reason why I have undertaken to publish the book below on pages 115-251.
Hard and Helpful for Impatient Pragmatists
The difficulties that stand in the way of seeing this vision are daunting, but hopeful. They are daunting because, as Noll hinted, "the human strain required to take in that vision" is immense. The book is hard to read. It was hard to read in its own day and it is harder today. Americans, as a whole (and evangelicals are little different in this), are not given to thinking much, let alone thinking at the level Edwards demands of us. This is especially true about doctrine. We are pragmatic. We demand quick solutions. We define success in measurable quantities. We have little patience with doctrinal precision. And we pastors who are infected with the pragmatic virus tend to justify our indifference to doctrine mainly by the fact that such reflection is not what the audience is looking for. Besides, it is stressful for relationships.
The recent lamentations over the drift of evangelicalism into pragmatic, doctrinally vague, audience-driven, culturally uncritical Christianity are, in my judgment, warranted and needed, in spite of the fact that, at the level of professional scholarship, there have been remarkable advances in the last fifty years. As a whole, and in the dominant shaping forces of evangelicalism, the criticism of Harry Blamires in 1963 is probably more true than ever: "There is no Christian Mind. ... The Christian Mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness unmatched in Christian History."
The increasing abandonment of truth and moral absolutes in our culture, as militant diversity threatens all firm conviction, has dramatically influenced the evangelical mindset. The political spin doctors who specialize in deflecting attention away from truth onto feelings and relationships and styles have their counterpart in the evangelical tendency to avoid doctrinal disputes by casting issues in terms of demeanor and method rather than truth. Serious disagreements are covered over, while vague language and pragmatic concerns preserve hollow unity at the expense of theological substance and Biblical clarity and power.
A Voice of Lament from Sri Lanka
The lament over the pragmatic hollowing out of evangelical conviction may be felt with unusual poignancy when it comes, not just from the intellectual elite, but from a person like Ajith Fernando, who leads Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka. He not only delivers solid exposition around the world, but also works among the poor and has wept over the horrors of 50,000 casualties of insurgency in one year of Sri Lanka's unrest. That was 1989, and he says, simply, "I struggled much with despair that year."
His strength, he says, came from the truth, and in that context he laments what he sees happening in the West: "A major shift ... has taken place in western evangelicalism where truth has been replaced by pragmatism as the major influencer of thought and life. This path is suicidal." He is heartened that voices are being raised, but then he says, "However, I feel that many evangelical leaders are so caught up in and blinded by this bondage to pragmatism that even though they may heartily endorse pleas to return to greater dependence on truth, endorsements make minimal inroads into their ministry styles and strategies." There is simply too little patience with the particularities of Biblical propositions that embody precious, life-sustaining doctrine.
So Much of Man, So Little of God
Jonathan Edwards had a profound insight into this very state of affairs, and it has to do directly with the absence of God-centeredness: "It is one great reason why speculative points [of doctrine] are thought to be of so little importance, that the modern religion consists so little in respect to the divine Being, and almost wholly in benevolence to men." In other words, the sickness that needs healing is the main hindrance to the remedy.
This means that Jonathan Edwards's "grand style of feeling and thinking is not ours and is alien to our way of life." Edwards's utter seriousness — his "blood-earnestness," as Thomas Chalmers called it — puts him out of sync with our chatty, humorous, entertainment-oriented, cartoon-illustrated spirituality. Edwards's sense of the desperate condition of mankind without God is so weighty that it takes our breath away. H. Richard Niebuhr commented that Edwards's awareness of the precariousness of life put him in a rare class: "He recognized what Kierkegaard meant when he described life as treading water with ten thousand fathoms beneath us."
We Need So Much More Than Benjamin Franklin
But at this very point the daunting difficulties in seeing Edwards's great vision of God may give way to hope. It may be that the theological impoverishment of the American church, and the precariousness of life, and the weariness with "successful" superficiality will make the voice of Jonathan Edwards more compelling than he has been for centuries.
Several others have held out this hope as they have contrasted the influence of Edwards and his contemporary Benjamin Franklin. Randall Stewart argues that
Franklin started us on the road which has led to a gadgeteers' paradise. But now that it is becoming startlingly clear that gad-gets can't save us, and may all too readily destroy us ... now that Dr. Franklin's lightning rod begins to look, from one view-point, like a pathetic symbol of human pride and inadequacy, while Edwards's soul-probings seem more searching to this generation of readers perhaps than they have ever seemed before, it is possible that Edwards will yet emerge, is already emerging, as the more useful, the more truly helpful, of the two.
Perry Miller, who professed no share in Edwards's faith, had a similar view of our condition: "[Edwards] is a reminder that, although our civilization has chosen to wander in the more genial meadows to which Franklin beckoned it, there come periods, either through disaster or through self-knowledge, when applied science and Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth seem not a sufficient philosophy of national life." That statement, made in 1949, seems to me like a thunderous understatement as the century closes. Franklin's pragmatism is theologically, morally, and spiritually bankrupt. That very cultural bankruptcy may awaken evangelicals from the folly of imitation.
Edwards vs. "Enlightened Human Intelligence"
In the heyday of nineteenth-century optimism, Oliver Wendell Holmes scoffed at Edwards's convictions as
not only false, not only absurd, but ... disorganizing forces in the midst of the thinking apparatus. Edwards's system seems, in the light of today, to the last degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived a hundred years later, and breathed the air of freedom, he could not have written with such old-world barbarism. ... The truth is that [his] whole system of beliefs ... is gently fading out of enlightened human intelligence, and we are hardly in a condition to realize what a tyranny it once exerted over many of the strongest minds.
Edwards's vision has not faded. It is being recovered and reconsidered more extensively and with more vigor today, perhaps, than at any time since his own day. The reason Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him off, and the reason there is hope that we may not, is that our century has shown Holmes's "enlightened human intelligence" to be the factory of the greatest global evils ever perpetrated in human history. Mark Noll comments, "Since most of the 20th century has been such a [dark] period, we may be in a position to hear Edwards more clearly than was the progressive generation of Holmes." In other words, in this case, the disease may make the remedy intelligible.
C. S. Lewis on the Necessity of Old Books
C. S. Lewis points to another reason we might see our darkening days as a hopeful opening to Edwards's End for Which God Created the World. Lewis was born in 1898 and died the same day as John F. Kennedy in 1963. His life was virtually coextensive with the twentieth century up to that point. From that perspective he said, "I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamoured of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them." Yes, and if he had lived to the end of the century, he would have been even less enamored of his own century than at the halfway mark.
From this Lewis goes on to stress that he wants and needs to read books from outside his own century. His reasons may open the wise to read Jonathan Edwards.
There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. ... This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. ... Now this seems to me topsyturvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. ... It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. ... We all ... need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. ... We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century ... lies where we have never suspected it. ... None of us can fully escape this blindness. ... The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
If Lewis is right, the very foreignness of Edwards's greatness is a hope-filled reason to read him. Yes, his way of writing is elevated; ours tends to be mundane and conversational. His thought is complex; ours tends to be elementary. His vision of reality is steadily God-centered; ours tends to be man-centered with occasional attention to God. He is relentlessly serious; we incline to lightheartedness and comic relief. He is truth-focused and cherishes the contours of doctrine; we tend to be feeling-focused and suspicious of the claim that doctrine has contours. Yes, but in spite of all that — and Lewis would say, because of all that — the effort to read Edwards would be well spent.
Mortimer Adler on the Necessity of Hard Books
Mortimer Adler would use another argument to persuade us. In his classic, How to Read a Book, he makes a passionate case that the books that enlarge our grasp of truth and make us wiser must feel, at first, beyond us. They "must make demands on you. They must seem to you to be beyond your capacity." If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.
Evangelical Christians, who believe God reveals himself primarily through a book, the Bible, should long to be the most able readers they can be. This means that we should want to become clear, penetrating, accurate, fair-minded thinkers, because all good reading involves asking questions and thinking. This is one reason why the Bible teaches us, "Do not be children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature" (1 Cor. 14:20 RSV). It's why Paul said to Timothy, "Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything" (2 Tim. 2:7). God's gift of understanding is through thinking, not instead of thinking.
Adler underlines his plea for the "major exertion" of reading great books with the warning that such mental exercise may lengthen your life, and television may be deadly.
The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used. ... And this is a terrible penalty, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that so many busy people die so soon after retirement. ... Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are ... artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from out-side. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect.
The Climb Will Be Worth It
Making the effort to read Jonathan Edwards merely for the sake of living longer would be a great irony. His aim is not to help us live long, nor even to live forever, but to help us live for God and that forever. And since our media-intoxicated culture is neither given to thinking, nor to straining Godward, the challenge and the potential of reading Edwards is doubled. The End for Which God Created the World may prove to be a life-giving fountain in more ways than we know — all the better for its mountain-height, and all the strain to climb worthwhile.
Attempting a Luther-like Copernican Revolution
In all this I long to persuade you to read and embrace Jonathan Edwards's The End for Which God Created the World. The public significance of this vision of God, known and embraced, would be epoch-making. Mark Noll compares Edwards's effort in this book to the aim of Martin Luther, who turned the world upside-down by restoring God to his rightful place. It "attempt[s] in the 18th century what Philip Watson once described as Martin Luther's main concern in the 16th century — the promotion of a theological 'Copernican Revolution' in which anthropocentric instincts are transformed into a theocentric picture of reality."
Edwards is strongest where we are weakest. He knows God. He sees and savors the supremacy of God in all things. Our culture is dying for want of this vision and this food. And, therefore, the publication of The End for Which God Created the World is a matter of great public significance.
SECTION TWO
A Personal Concern
Publishing The End for Which God Created the World is also an intensely personal concern for me. As I said at the beginning, the vision of God displayed in that book took me captive thirty years ago and has put its stamp on every part of my life and ministry. I believe and love its message. My personal reason for making the book more accessible is to join God in pursuing the invincible end for which he created the world. That end, Edwards says, is, first, that the glory of God might be magnified in the universe, and, second, that Christ's ransomed people from all times and all nations would rejoice in God above all things.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "God's Passion for His Glory"
by .
Copyright © 1998 John Piper.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
PART ONE A Personal Encounter with Jonathan Edwards by John Piper,
CHAPTER ONE: The End for Which God Created the World Why Publish an Old Book? A Personal and Public Concern,
CHAPTER TWO: Jonathan Edwards, The Man and His Life Learning from an Unmodern Evangelical,
CHAPTER THREE: Jonathan Edwards, A Mind in Love with God The Private Life of a Modern Evangelical,
CHAPTER FOUR: Jonathan Edwards, Enjoying God and the Transformation of Culture,
The Public Life of a Modern Evangelical,
PART TWO The End for Which God Created the World by Jonathan Edwards,
A Note on How to Read The End for Which God Created the World Concerning the Text Used in This Edition of The End for Which God Created the World,
INTRODUCTION: Containing Explanations of Terms and General Positions,
CHAPTER ONE: Wherein Is Considered What Reason Teaches Concerning This Affair,
SECTION ONE: Some things observed in general which reason dictates,
SECTION TWO: Some further observations concerning those things which reason leads us to suppose God aimed at in the creation of the world,
SECTION THREE: Wherein it is considered how, on the supposition of God's making the aforementioned things his last end, he manifests a supreme and ultimate regard to himself in all his works,
SECTION FOUR: Some objections considered, which may be made against the reasonableness of what has been said of God making himself his last end,
CHAPTER TWO: Wherein It Is Inquired What Is to Be Learned from Holy Scriptures Concerning God's Last End in the Creation of the World,
SECTION ONE: The Scriptures represent God as making himself his own last end in the creation of the world,
SECTION TWO: Wherein some positions are advanced concerning a just method of arguing in this affair from what we find in the Holy Scriptures,
SECTION THREE: Particular texts of Scripture which show that God's glory is an ultimate end of the creation,
SECTION FOUR: Places of Scripture that lead us to suppose that God created the world for his name, to make his perfections known; and that he made it for his praise,
SECTION FIVE: Places of Scripture from whence it may be argued that communication of good to the creature was one thing which God had in view as an ultimate end of the creation of the world,
SECTION SIX: Wherein is considered what is meant by the glory of God and the name of God in Scripture, when spoken of as God's end in his works,
SECTION SEVEN: Showing that the ultimate end of the creation of the world is but one, and what that one end is A Note on Resources: Desiring God Ministries,
What People are Saying About This
"One studies the time and backgrounds of some men in order to understand them. Others have such rare greatness that one studies them in order to understand their times. . . . Jonathan Edwards was such an original."
—Paul Ramsey, Editor of Edwards's ethical writings in the Yale critical edition
"No man is more relevant to the present condition of Christianity than Jonathan Edwards."
—Martyn Lloyd-Jones
"The western church . . . much of it drifting, enculturated, and infected with cheap grace . . . desperately needs to hear Edwards's challenge."
—Charles Colson, founder, Prison Fellowship and the Colson Center for Christian Worldview
"[Edwards] speaks with an insight into science and psychology so much ahead of his time that our own can hardly be said to have caught up with him."
—Perry Miller, Former Harvard Historian
"One of the most holy, humble and heavenly minded men that the world has seen since the apostolic age."
—Ashbel Green, 1829, Former President of the College of New Jersey
". . . the profoundest reasoner, and the greatest divine . . . that America ever produced."
—Samuel Davies, 1759
"[Edwards] was a man who put faithfulness to the Word of God before every other consideration."
—Iain H. Murray, author, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography and Evangelical Holiness; Founding Trustee, Banner of Truth Trust
"The disappearance of Edwards's [God-entranced] perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy."
—Mark A. Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame; editor, Protestantism after 500 Years
"Edwards's book, The End for Which God Created the World [is] . . . unsurpassed in terms of its theological grandeur."
—David Brand, Author, Edwards Scholar