AN INFINITE FOUNTAIN OF LIGHT:
Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-first Century
By George Marsden
InterVarsityPress. 163 pages. £19.99
ISBN 978 1 514 006 627
George Marsden is the author of the brilliant and definitive 615-page 2003 Yale biography of Jonathan Edwards. This book seeks, in five relatively brief chapters based on the author’s 2008 Stone Lectures at Princeton, to provide a 21st-century retrospect on Edwards’ life and ministry.
Marsden quotes C.S. Lewis: ‘The next best thing to being wise yourself is to live in a circle of those who are.’ Many including Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Tim Keller and John Piper have spoken of the valuable influence of ‘hanging out with Edwards’.
Building on Lewis’ idea that theologians need translators, Marsden suggests that assessments of Edwards need to reflect on his personality and the time and place that shaped him. It is interesting to reflect on the facts that significant women were a key factor in his life and that for most of Edwards’ ministry he operated on the ‘frontier’, rather than like a Keller-like figure in Manhattan. Marsden highlights Edwards’ tendency to take some of his thoughts too far, particularly in his projections concerning the future. He also argues that although Edwards was wrong in owning slaves, he did reject the underlying racism that sought to justify the enslavement of other races, and subsequently his descendants used this ethical thinking to argue against the slave trade.
In two chapters Marsden compares and contrasts Edwards with both the entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the evangelist George Whitefield. These provide fascinating windows on the personality and methodology of Edwards. The author makes the observation that Edwards did not possess a ‘…flexible personality. He was not good at the give and take of casual conversation’. This, the author suggests, contributed both to his clarity of expression in his writings and a social uneasiness that contributed to his dramatic exit from the church in Northampton. It would have been good to have seen the author tease that suggestion out more fully.
Two chapters reflect on two major themes in Edwards’ preaching and writing: The beauty of God, and How we can discern spiritual reality. Both these themes are of great contemporary relevance as we seek to re-enchant the imagination of a generation that is indifferent to the excellence of God and His ways and maintain spiritual quality control among those who profess faith in Christ.
The book concludes with one of Edwards’ greatest hits, the sermon ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light’. It is a reminder that one of the best ways to experience Edwards is in his sermons. This one, with its sublime example of how we discern that honey is sweet, demonstrates the genius of Edwards and the beauty of the God he lovingly served, so that the hearer can ‘taste and see that he is good’.
