The theologian of love

Often when people think of Jonathan Edwards as a preacher, his famous 1741 Enfield sermon ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’ is what first comes to mind. But the reality is that Edwards preached more often on heaven.

His sermon ‘Heaven, a world of love’, preached a few years before the Enfield sermon, was actually more typical of Edwards’ sermonic corpus. He was, as a number of books on Edwards have recently emphasised, preeminently a theologian of love. His concern for the salvation and welfare of native Americans in Massachusetts is another good example of this focus.

On 16 August 1751 Edwards delivered a sermon to a group of Mohawks in Albany, New York. The Mohawks had come to Albany to discuss with Edwards what might be entailed in sending their children to a school in Stockbridge. After the discussions, Edwards was given an opportunity to preach to them. He began by stating that ‘when God first made man, he had a principle of holiness in his heart’, like a light shining within Him. But then the man sinned against God and he ‘lost his holiness’. The light that he had was ‘put out’ and his mind became full of darkness. The long-term result was idolatry: the worship of heavenly bodies, ‘images of gold and silver, brass and iron, wood and stone’, animals and even the devil.