It’s important to know where you came from.
Here are two biographies I’ve read in the past few months that I think will encourage you and give you insights into why we do the things we do.
The first is George Marsden’s A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Marsden wrote a long–very long–biography of the great theologian some years ago that is supposedly very good (I’ve been meaning to read it). But the great thing about A Short Life is that it’s quite short–around 150 pages. It’s clear and easy to read. And it provides some great insights into both Edwards’ life and ministry and the way life and ministry really was in the 18th century.
Here’s an example: For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve heard parents and pastors blame the media (I think MTV used to bear the brunt of evangelical fury) for the promiscuity of teenagers. We seem to assume that in the good old days, young people remained pure and chaste until marriage.
Jonathan Edwards didn’t think so. He spoke aggressively against the “company keeping” that was a favorite pastime among the youth in Puritan New England. Apparently as early as the mid-1700s, “it had become hardly unusual for the first child of a young couple to be born less than seven months after their marriage.” Edwards didn’t blame the media for premarital sex; he blamed original sin. Sometimes it helps to get a little perspective.
The second is Harry Stout’s The Divine Dramatist. This book covers the evangelist George Whitefield, who was America’s first celebrity. Now, he lived before the Revolution, so we weren’t yet “united states”; we were just a bunch of colonies that had little to do with each other.
But Whitefield was popular enough everywhere that he brought them together. He changed the definition of the word “revival” from an experience within a community to an event in the fields. He revolutionized preaching and made phrases like “born again” into household terms.
In short, if you have any questions about why evangelicals think and do certain things, a great place to start looking for answers is with Whitefield. That being said, Stout’s book is longer and less accessible than Marsden’s, but it’s good nonetheless.
I hope you’ll plan to put one of these books on your reading list for 2009. If you’re like me, you’ll learn nearly as much about yourself as about the subject of the biography.
