Jonathan Edwards' Resolutions: And Advice to Young Converts
(While completing his preparation for the ministry, Jonath...)
While completing his preparation for the ministry, Jonathan Edwards wrote seventy resolutions that guided him throughout his life. About twenty years later he wrote a letter to young Deborah Hatheway, a new convert in a nearby town, advising her concerning the Christian life. These two writings, often reprinted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, overflow with straightforward and biblically sound advice. This advice is as current today as it was in the 1700s, and it far surpasses the "how to" books now overrunning bookstores.
(Considered by many to be the greatest book by enormously ...)
Considered by many to be the greatest book by enormously influential American preacher and theologian JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758), this provocative 1754 work explores the necessity of God's grace for the salvaging of the damaged "will" of humanity and argues that free will is an extension of and connected to the grace of God. What is the nature of morality? Can God be evil? What constitutes sin? How does God's foreknowledge of all events impact concepts of morality? How does intent inform our acts of vice and virtue? Still controversial and hotly debated in the 21st century, this demanding evangelistic work-some call it the best argument for the sovereignty of God-is among the essential reading of the thinker whose philosophies inspired the 18th-century religious of the Great Awakening, which continues to hugely influence American Protestantism to this day. Freedom of the Will will enthrall and challenge serious readers of the Bible as well as students of theology's impact on American history.
(Delivered 250 years ago, this is the most famous sermon e...)
Delivered 250 years ago, this is the most famous sermon ever preached in the history of America. Far more than a depiction of the punishments of hell, it is a call to personal salvation through Christ and spiritual revival in our time.
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)
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In his essay The End for Which God Created the World, t...)
In his essay The End for Which God Created the World, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards proclaimed that God's ultimate end is the manifestation of his glory in the highest happiness of his creatures.
Pastor John Piper has devoted his years of ministry to exploring the implications of this stunning truth for life and ministry. Understanding that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him has made all the difference for John Piper-and can transform your life as well.
Here Piper passionately demonstrates the relevance of Edwards's ideals for the personal and public lives of Christians today through his own book-length introduction to Edwards's The End for Which God Created the World. This book also contains the complete essay supplemented by almost a hundred of Piper's insightful explanatory notes. The result is a powerful and persuasive presentation of the things that matter most in the Christian life.
The Complete Works of Jonathan Edwards: Christ Exalted, Sinners in the Hands of the Angry God, A Divine and Supernatural Light, Christian Knowledge, On ... (59 Books With Active Table of Contents)
(This collection gathers together the works by Jonathan Ed...)
This collection gathers together the works by Jonathan Edwards in a single, convenient, high quality, and extremely low priced Kindle volume!
1. Memoirs of Jonathan Edwards, A. M.
2. An Inquiry Into The Modern Prevailing Notions of The Freedom of Will
3. A Dissertation Concerning The End For Which God Made The World
4. A Dissertation Concerning The Nature of True Virtue
5. The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended: Evidences of Its Truth Produced and Arguments to The Contrary answered
6. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections
7. An Humble Inquiry Into The Rules of The Word of God: Concerning The Qualifications Requisite to A Complete Standing and Full Communion In The Visible Christian Church
8. Misinterpretations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated
9. A History of The Work of Redemption, Containing The Outlines of a Body of Divinity, Including a View of Church History
10. Five Discourses On The Soul's Eternal Salvation
11. God Glorified In Man's Dependence
12. Sinners In The Hands of an Angry God
13. A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to The Soul By The Spirit of God, Shown to Be Both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine
14. Fifteen Sermons On Various Subjects
15. Seven Sermons On Important Subjects
16. Christian Knowledge: The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth
17. The Wisdom of God, Displayed In The Way of Salvation
18. Discourse On How Men Naturally Are God's Enemies
19. Christian Cautions and The Necessity of Self-Examination
20. Christian Charity: The Duty of Charity to The Poor, Explained and Enforced
21. A Warning to Professors
22. The Final Judgment: The World Judged Righteously By Jesus Christ
23. Sinners In Zion Tenderly Warned:
24. The End of The Wicked Contemplated By The Righteous: Or, The Torments of The Wicked In Hell, No Occasion of Grief to The Saints In Heavens
25. Christ Exalted: Or, Jesus Christ Gloriously Exalted Above All Evil In The Work of Redemption
26. Self-Flatteries: Or, The Vain Self-Flatteries of The Sinner
27. Dishonesty: Or, The Sin of Theft and of Injustice
28. Temptation and Deliverance: Joseph's Great Temptation and Gracious Deliverance
29. The Preciousness of Time, and The Importance of Redeeming It
30. Procrastination, Or The Sin and Folly of Depending On Future Time
31. The Christian Pilgrim: The True Christian's Life a Journey Towards Heaven
32. Man's Natural Blindness In The Things of Religion
33. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of The Spirit of God
34. An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People
35. The Life and Diary of the Rev. David Brainerd With Notes and Reflection
36. The Divinity of Christ and the Doctrine of the Trinity
37. Miscellaneous Obeservation on Important Theological Subjects
38. Remarks On Important Theological Controversies
39. A Divine and Supernatural Light
40. On The Natural Condition of Men
41. The Sorrows of the Bereaved Spread Before Jesus
42. Christ The Example of Ministers
43. The True Exellence of a Gosple Minister
44. Jesus Christ, The Same Yesterday, To-day, and Forever
45. Christ Jesus: Abundant Foundation of Peace and Safety
46. On The Wicked
47. Thanksgiving Sermon
48. On The Purity of The Heart
49. On The Glory, Honor and Peace of The Christians
50. The Description and Punishment of The Wicked
51. On The Soul of Christ
52. On The Imitation of Paul and The Apostles
53. On The Bestowment of Great and Signal Mercies
54. God's Sovereignty
55. On The First True Hope and Comfort Which is Given to The Soul at Conversion
56. True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils
57. God's Awful Judgment
58. True Saints, When Absent from the Body, Are Present
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In one of the unsurpassed religious masterpieces produc...)
In one of the unsurpassed religious masterpieces produced by an American writer, Jonathan Edwards distinguishes between true and false religion by defining a believer's correct affections and explaining their importance. He further identifies the distinction between genuine-seeming and legitimate affections.
A Christian preacher and one of the greatest theologians of the English-speaking world, Jonathan Edwards played a critical role in the First Great Awakening and oversaw some of the first revivals in 1733 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. His famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," remains a classic of early American literature, and Religious Affections constitutes essential reading for divinity students and students of American religious history.
Jonathan Edwards was an American theologian and philosopher.
Background
He was born on the 5th of October 1703 at East (now South) Windsor, Connecticut, United States. His earliest known ancestor was Richard Edwards, Welsh by birth, a London clergyman in Elizabeth's reign. His father Timothy Edwards was the son of a prosperous merchant of Hartford, had graduated at Harvard, was minister at East Windsor, and eked out his salary by tutoring boys for college. His mother, Esther Stoddard was the daughter of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Massachussets, seems to have been a woman of unusual mental gifts and independence of character. Jonathan, the only son, was the fifth of eleven children.
Education
The boy was trained for college by his father and by his elder sisters, who all received an excellent education. He entered Yale College in 1716, and in the following year became acquainted with Locke's Essay, which influenced him profoundly. He graduated in September 1720. The two years after his graduation he spent in New Haven studying theology.
In 1724-1726 was one of the two tutors at Yale, earning for himself the name of a "pillar tutor" by his steadfast loyalty to the college and its orthodox teaching at the time when Yale's rector (Cutler) and one of her tutors had gone over to the Episcopal Church. On the 15th of February 1727 he was ordained minister at Northampton and assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. He was a student minister, not a visiting pastor.
Solomon Stoddard died on the 11th of February 1729, leaving to his grandson the difficult task of the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony. In 1731 Edwards preached at Boston the "Public Lecture" afterwards published under the title God Glorified in Man's Dependence. This was his first public attack on Arminianism. He recorded his observations with psychological minuteness and discrimination in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Norihampton (1737).
Later he published Discourses on Various Important Subjects, the five sermons which had proved most effective in the revival. Another sermon was published in 1734, on the Reality of Spiritual Light. In 1741 Edwards published The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, dealing particularly with the phenomena most criticized, the swoonings, outcries and convulsions.
Edwards preached at Northampton during the years 1742 and 1743 a series of sermons published under the title of Religious Affections (1746), a restatement in a more philosophical and general tone of his ideas as to "distinguishing marks." In 1747 he joined the movement started in Scotland called the "concert in prayer".
In 1748 there had come a crisis in his relations with his congregation. The Half-Way Covenant adopted by the synods of 1657 and 1662 had made baptism alone the condition to the civil privileges of church membership, but not of participation in the sacrament of the Supper Edwards's grandfather and predecessor, Solomon Stoddard, had been even more liberal, holding that the Supper was a converting ordinance and that baptism was a sufficient title to all the privileges of the church. As early as 1744 Edwards, in his sermons on the Religious Affections, had plainly intimated his dislike of this practice. In the same year he had published in a church meeting the names of certain young people, members of the church, who were suspected of reading improper books, and also the names of those who were to be called as witnesses in the case. But witnesses and accused were not distinguished on this list, and the congregation was in an uproar.
He became the pastor of the church in Stockbridge in 1750 and a missionary to the Housatonic Indians in the same year. To the Indians he preached through an interpreter, and their interests he boldly and successfully defended by attacking the whites Edwards recognized the abuse of impulses and impressions, opposed itinerant and lay preachers, and defended a well-ordered and well-educated clergy.
In Stockbridge he wrote the Humble Relation, also called Reply to Williams (1752), which was an answer to Solomon Williams (1700 - 1776), a relative and a bitter opponent of Edwards as to the qualifications for full communion; and he there composed the treatises on which his reputation as a philosophical theologian chiefly rests.
In 1757, on the death of President Burr, who five years before had married Edwards's daughter Esther, he reluctantly accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he was installed on the 16th of February 1758. Almost immediately afterwards he was inoculated for smallpox, which was raging in Princeton and vicinity, and, always feeble, he died of the inoculation on the 28th of March 1758.
(Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards By Jonathan Edwards)
Religion
It is difficult to separate Edwards's philosophy from his theology, except as the former is contained in the early notes on the Mind, where he says that matter exists only in idea; that space is God; that minds only are real; that in metaphysical strictness there is no being but God; that entity is the greatest and only good; and that God as infinite entity, wherein the agreement of being with being is absolute, is the supreme excellency, the supreme good.
For him the alternative was between Calvinism and Arminianism, simply because of the historical situation, and in the refutation of Arminianism on the assumptions common to both sides of the controversy, he must be considered completely successful. Edwards's controversy with the Arminians was continued in the essay on Original Sin, which was in the press at the time of his death. He here breaks with Augustine and the Westminster Confession by arguing, consistently with his theory of the Will, that Adam had no more freedom of will than we have, but had a special endowment, a supernatural gift of grace, which by rebellion against God was lost, and that this gift was withdrawn from his descendants, not because of any fictitious imputation of guilt, but because of their real participation in his guilt by actual identity with him in his transgression.
His theological conception of God, at any rate, was not abstractly pantheistic, in spite of the abstractness of his language about "being," but frankly theistic and trinitarian. He held the doctrine of the trinitarian distinctions indeed to be a necessity of reason.
Views
Edwards's reputation as a thinker is chiefly associated with his treatise on the Will. The aim of this treatise was to refute the doctrine of free-will. He defines the will as that by which the "mind chooses anything." To act voluntarily, he says, is to act electively. So far he and his opponents are agreed. But choice, he holds, is not arbitrary; it is determined in every case by "that motive which as it stands in the view of the mind is the strongest," and that motive is strongest which presents in the immediate object of volition the "greatest apparent good," that is, the greatest degree of agreeableness or pleasure. What this is in a given case depends on a multitude of circumstances, external and internal, all contributing to form the "cause" of which the voluntary act and its consequences are the "effect."
Edwards contends that the connexion between cause and effect is as "sure and perfect" as in the realm of physical nature and constitutes a "moral necessity." He reduces the opposite doctrine to three assumptions, all of which he shows to be untenable: (1) "a self-determining power in the will"; (2) "indifference , . that the mind previous to the act of volition (is) in equilibrio"; (3) "contingence . .. as opposed to any fixed and certain connexion (of the volition) with some previous ground or reason for its existence."
Liberty, he holds, is simply freedom from constraint, "the power that any one has to do as he pleases." This power man possesses. And that the right or wrong of choice depends not on the cause of choice but on its nature.
Personality
He was slender and fully six feet tall, and with his oval, gentle, almost feminine face looked the scholar and the mystic.
Connections
In 1727 he married Sarah Pierrepont, daughter of James Pierrepont (1659 - 1714), a founder of Yale, and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker. Sarah's spiritual devotion was without peer, and her relationship with God had long proved an inspiration to Edwards. She was a model wife and the mother of his twelve children.