Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love

6. Love

98 6 LOVE Unenforceable obligations are beyond the reach of the laws of society. They concern inner attitudes, genuine person-to-person relations, and expressions of compassion which law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. . . . Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. — Martin Luther King Jr. Love pervades Jonathan Edwards’s ministry and writings, a point often overlooked given his lingering reputation as a preacher of damnation. In fact, Edwards, though understanding, as we have seen, that fear had its utility in the pulpit, was overwhelmingly a minister of the gospel of love rather than of fear. The doctrine of Christian love (“God is love,” “God so loved the world,” “the greatest of these is love”) achieved its fullest expression in the gospel and epistles of John and the letters of Paul, and Edwards referenced these books thousands of times over the course of his ministry and built some of his greatest sermons around them, weaving love’s power and urgency into the fabric of his ministry to a degree that stands out even in comparison to other great figures of the cloth and cloister. Though a Calvinist, Edwards was not chiefly a preacher of damnation. Though damnation was ever at hand, Edwards the Calvinist was chiefly a preacher within the tradition of Christian love. Considering Edwards in this context will locate him at the epicenter of his faith and increase our understanding of what he was about. Love saturates Edwards’s theology and his ideas about holiness and holy society—what Paul Ramsey calls the “Christian moral life,” which encompasses charity and community and sainthood and Heaven and cannot be fully grasped without attention to love.1 True religion, says Ed- > > Love 99 wards, is “summarily comprehended in love.”2 The Edwardsian God is an awesome entity whose absolute power Edwards spent his life explaining and defending against the lax, the misguided, and the skeptical. But he is more than powerful. He is also absolutely perfect, beautiful, and excellent and therefore, in Edwards’s scheme of things, he loves himself and his own beauty and perfection and excellence. God embodies the essence of “love” and the “act of love” because he has an “infinite . . . love of himself ” and his own “beauty.” He loves himself with a “holiness” and “delight ” that match his own excellence.3 “Delight in himself” is the sum of God’s “inclination, love and joy.”4 God’s “nature and temper” are love.5 Love swirls as well through Edwards’s conception of the Trinity, a vital component of his theology, because for there to be genuine love there must be others to love. This is true even for God, who loves himself but does so within the context of a tripartite Godhead comprising God the father, his son Christ, and the Holy Spirit, each with a particular theological identity and function, each remaining nonetheless a part of the composite whole. Love is therefore an attribute of God and also of the Trinitarian Godhead, whose “divine nature and essence” and “holiness and happiness” consist and subsist in the “perfect and intimate” love between Father and Son and Holy Spirit in a “bond” of full “union.” The happiness of the Deity, “as all other true happiness,” consists in “love and society.” The Trinity constitutes the society that allows God’s love to express itself. God’s joy is a “social happiness” in the persons of the Trinity.6 Love is therefore inherently and irreducibly social and relational. God, moreover, loves perfection so much that he created the world and its creatures, humans included, out of a joyous exuberant desire to expand and radiate himself into infinity. God’s love to himself, his “disposition . . . to communicate” and “diffuse his own good[ness],” constitutes “a love to whatever is worthy and excellent,” and his “love to himself” is nothing but “delight” in excellence.7 God inevitably loves all his creation, which is only himself writ large, and therefore loves men because they, like all else, are his creations. However, humans are also special. God loves humans because they are his “children,” his “creatures” (creations), but he also loves them because they are “in his image” and “partake of his loveliness” and therefore possess spiritual and intellectual capacities that are comparable, even though inferior, to those of God himself—includ- Love 100 ing, notably, the capacity not only to hold God in awe...