Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love

3. Tropes

27 3 TROPES Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because here they can unite in the Word. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer Intellectual, Calvinist, revivalist, and scold are identities suggestive of a stern and judgmental individual, which Jonathan Edwards clearly could be when duty demanded, as it so often did given all that was at stake. Words such as “intense,” “tactless,” “grave,” “stiff,” “threatening,” “disturbing ,” and above all “serious” run through the biographical studies.1 But these same biographers also use softer, less pejorative terms such as “overconfident,” “single-minded,” and “certain,” and Edwards’s own contemporaries saw for the most part a less than frightening figure. The powerful “Sinners” sermon filled the congregation with “cheerfulness and pleasantness” as well as shrieks, says a local diarist. Edwards “wept” at a Whitefield sermon, and Whitefield himself describes Edwards as “adorned with a meek and quiet spirit” and Jonathan and Sarah as wonderful examples of “Christian simplicity,” a “sweeter couple” than he had ever seen.2 Samuel Hopkins, who lived in the Edwards household in the early 1740s, wrote that Edwards was “not a man of many words,” was “reserved among strangers,” and could appear “unsociable.” Hopkins attributed this quietness partly to Edwards’s lifelong frailty and partly to his work habits, which kept him in his study many hours a day reading, writing, meeting parishioners, and praying, except in good weather when he rode or walked. Yet among friends, says Hopkins, he was “easy of access,” kind and approachable , “open and free.” He was a warm and hospitable host to his frequent guests, always (recorded a visiting minister) “very courteous,” > > tropes 28 “kind,” and “agreeable.” Timothy Dwight, a youthful visitor, describes him as “relaxed” and readily able to enjoy “cheerful and animated conversations ” and to enter “truly into the feelings and concerns of his children ,” who would sometimes be with him on journeys by horseback or to plant trees.3 Throughout the difficulties leading to his dismissal in 1750, he showed, says a contemporary, “not the least symptoms of displeasure in his countenance,” appearing rather like a man whose “happiness was beyond his enemies’ reach” and whose treasure was “not only a future but a present good.”4 We know Edwards chiefly through his language. The center of his life was, in George Marsden’s words, “his devotion to God expressed with pen and ink.”5 And here, too, as with his personality, a more rounded, less angular Edwards emerges, one who is not predominantly a preacher of imprecatory “awakening” sermons filled with images of fire and pain. Powerful as these surely were, they constitute only a small portion, perhaps a few dozen, of his thousand sermons.6 Images of fire were important , as they are in the Bible. But there are other tropes in Edwards’s work—among them especially light, beauty, harmony, and sweetness— that also deserve our attention. Light was Edwards’s favorite image and metaphor. He was a man of Scripture , and Scripture enshrines the concept of light from the creation of the world (“Let there be light”) to the coming of the Messiah (“I am the light of the world”). He was also a man of his time. Though Edwards sometimes mocked them, luminaires such as Newton (and the early Edwards) sought “enlightenment” by studying the nature of light and its revelations and so began to shift human perceptions of the universe. Edwards, who knew his optics as well as his Bible, employed the concept of light more frequently, and looked more avidly for its true meaning and carried it to greater rhetorical heights, than anyone else of his day.7 “Jesus Christ the Light of the World” was a poetic early effort. His first major published sermon was A Divine and Supernatural Light, followed shortly by, among others, “Jesus Christ is the shining forth of the Father’s glory,” “False Light and True,” and “Light in a Dark World, a Dark Heart.” And on to the very end in Northampton with “Sons of Oil, Heavenly Lights,” an ordination sermon, and in Stockbridge to his Indian charges, “Of Those Who Walk in the Light of God’s Countenance.” tropes 29 Light represents, as is self-evident and imperative for Edwards, first and foremost the beams of God...