Peep Deep, Volume 1, no. 1

Jonathan Edwards, A New Biography, by Iain H. Murry.

Introduction: On Understanding Edwards, p. xix - xxxi

Basically, Jonathan Edwards blows people's minds. Is he a metaphysicist, a philosopher, or a theologian (a "divine")? His contemporaries acknowledged him as one of the greatest theologians of all time, certainly of their day. Secular biographers and writers in the centuries since Edwards was born (1703. Many years before the oldest member in our church) have actually bemoaned the fact that Edwards wasted his brilliant and unequaled mind on theology!

But "those who knew him best never put 'the philosopher' first. A fellow preacher, Giblert Tennent, announcing Edwards' death in a Philadelphia newspaper of March 28, 1758, described him as 'a great divine, divnity was his favourite [that's how they spelled favorite back then] study and the ministry his most delightful employment" (p. xix).

Murray, the author, explains why most biographers and historians just don't get it. Being unbelievers, they simply cannot grasp what even a small, believing child sees so clearly. Edwards knew this.

"According to the New Testament, and therefore to Edwards also, the difference between the regenenerate Christian and the remainder of men constitutes the most radical of all divisions. What is revealed to babes is hidden from the proud. The reason, he says, 'why the things of the gospel seem all so tasteless and insipid to natural men' is that 'they are a parcel of words to which they, in their own minds, have no correspondent ideas'. 'It is like a stranger or a dead letter, that is, sounds and letters without any signification. This is the reason they commonly account religion such a foolish thing, and the saints fools. This is the reason the Scripture is not sweet to them, and why the godly are called by the name of fanatics, and the like'"(p. xxv).

Someone said that to remember history means far more than "a mere bow to history." "His theology had revivals and repentance, and salvation from hell, in it; and this made it, and makes it, and will keep it divine theology till Christ is all in all."

I agree with with Murray. "We fail to understand Edwards aright until the record of his life begins to make the same impression upon us."