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Edwards's was a theology (study of God) done foremost as doxology (worship of God), and complemented with a generous helping of psychology (experience of God). He wasn't content, to borrow a phrase from J. I. Packer, just to know about God. He knew that if men and women were to find salvation, restoration, and healing, they must first know God, in an empirical sense.

If evangelicalism has indeed—as Ted Olsen suggests in this week's Christianity Todayweblog—taken a great leap in the last decade or two toward rebuilding the intellectual vitality and respectability that marked the seventeenth-century Puritans, its success owes much to this "300-year-old man." He was a giant among modern thinkers. He applied his mind just as much to the daily experiences of real human beings as to the abstruse realms of academic philosophy and dogmatic theology. More profoundly, he understood that these two subject areas are not actually different, but rather two approaches to the same eternal, pressing human questions. And through pulpit and pen, he said so to everyone who would listen.

Scholarship as ministry: Today, nothing could seem more quixotic, even oxymoronic, to many evangelicals. Yet there stands Jonathan Edwards, the great thinker/minister: a Yale-trained genius capable of the most subtle philosophical exploration, who helped shape America's first revival. Out of his careful reflections, God enabled him to shepherd the Great Awakening past its first excesses into a mature, local-church-based revivalism both theologically robust and spiritually impassioned (Religious Affections shows him at his best in that role).

Need evangelicals—especially today's evangelical students who desire above all to serve Christ and his "body" the church—look any further for a model?

Edwards is our grandfather. But not in the distant, vaguely dour way implied by the somber portrait of the Great Man hanging in the Yale art gallery. Rather, he still, after 300 years, gathers his grandkids around him, to teach by loving example that head without heart, and heart without head, both fail to make the kind of faith that lasts and that impacts the world.

We stand in a divided America, where the spiritually useless and doctrinally bankrupt theology of many universities and seminaries and the shallow, emotionally self-indulgent praise-and-worship addiction of many revivalistic churches glare across a seemingly unbridgeable chasm. Stretching his arms across the gulf is this warm-hearted, brilliant grandfather-figure—Jonathan Edwards.

Happy 300th, Jonathan. May your tribe increase.

***

Christian History threw our own party for Edwards in our issue #77, where you will find an interview with George Marsden on what Edwards can teach us today. Marsden's biography of Edwards is, as Tolson suggests in his article, a great way to get to know Edwards at closer quarters.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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