Christian History articles from February 2003

Christian History archives from February 2003

Interesting and unusual facts about Jonathan Edwards. (Did You Know?).
February 1, 2003... Evangelical Co-founder A man was born three months before Edwards and an ocean away who was to share the New England divine's twin passions for the church and the life of the mind. That man was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The...

"Papa Edwards". (Letter From The Editor).(Jonathan Edwards)(Editorial)
February 1, 2003... Conversion. Revival. Biblical authority. A warm-hearted faith touching all areas of personal and social life. Billy Graham believes in these things. So did Billy Sunday, D. L. Moody, and Charles Finney. And so do countless others today who...

A modern Puritan. (Introducing).(Jonathan Edwards)(Editorial)
February 1, 2003... Modern Puritan." That's an oxymoron, right? Puritans, with their ultra-serious obsession with getting every detail of the Christian life just right, seem an anachronism in today's free-and-easy America. In this world, religion has become, for...

A mind on fire: throughout his eventful life, "America's theologian" was driven by a vision of the beauty in God's sovereignty.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... A battered file box, deep in the basement of Yale University's Beinecke Library, contains a startling memorial to the final years of Jonathan Edwards's life. In other similar boxes, stacks of notebooks contain in their neat pages crisp...

Devoted disciplinarian: Pastor Edwards spared neither loving care nor the rod.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... In February 1740, Jonathan Edwards addressed an ordination sermon to the congregation of Cold Spring, Massachusetts. He reminded their new pastor, Edward Billing, that God had not left it to ministers to determine their mission. ...

The trouble with George: Edwards worried that the strong emotions raised by George Whitefield's preaching would produce not steady Christians but religious hypocrites.(Jonathan Edwards adapted from article in New England Quarterly, September 1997)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... It is wonderful to see what a spell he casts over an audience.... I have seen upwards of a thousand people hang on his words with breathless silence, broken only by an occasional half-suppressed sob." These were the words of Sarah Edwards,...

The mind shapers: Edwards modeled himself as theologian, philosopher, and pastor after outstanding figures in each field. (The Gallery).(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564) John Calvin, the forerunner of the Reformed tradition, leaves his imprint upon Edwards in a variety of ways. The Reformer's influence especially pervades Edwards's writings and sermons on the Arminian...

Those exceptional Edwards women: Jonathan spent his life surrounded by remarkable women, and it showed in his writings.
February 1, 2003... When Jonathan Edwards was about to die, he dictated his final words to his daughter Lucy. His thoughts were of his wife, Sarah, who had not yet joined him at their new home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had just become college president....

Passing the torch. (The Christian History Timeline).(Joanthan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... While Jonathan Edwards's intellectual agenda dominated America s formal religious thought until the mid-nineteenth century, his renovation of Calvinism and his writings on revival have continued to be read, debated, contested, and admired. He...

Pilgrim's paradise: heaven's bliss was among Edwards's favorite preaching themes. An excerpt from his sermon, "The Christian Pilgrim." (Archive).
February 1, 2003... "And confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country." --HEBREWS 11:13-14 This world is not our abiding place. Our continuance here is but very...

Testing the spirits: the heart-stirring revivalism of the Great Awakening led Edwards to develop a new religious psychology.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... Puritanism had lost its vitality, and for years, the "friends of vital piety" had prayed for revival. Finally, in the late 1730s and early 1740s, a great spiritual dam seemed to break in New England. Streams of Christian conviction and...

The book of James: the famed William James drew on Edwards's psychology but not his theology.(Jonathan Edwards)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... To this day Edwards's Treatise Concerning Religious Affections has, for profound insight into the nature of religious experience, only one rival. That is William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Indeed, at several junctures,...

Language of ecstasy: Edwards's interest in religious psychology arose from his own almost mystical encounters with God.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... Edwards first encountered God in an intensely experiential way while reading 1 Timothy 1:17: "Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever." He was overcome with "a sense of the glory...

The Northampton eviction: what happened when a pastor's irresistible ideals met his congregation's immovable status-consciousness.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... Jonathan Edwards was, for the most part, a withdrawn, soft-spoken man. Yet much of his life was caught up in controversy, and he faulted himself for an argumentative tendency. The "Resolutions" he drew up while serving a small congregation...

Holy pagans: could a person be saved without an explicit knowledge of Christ? Among the Stockbridge Indians, Edwards began to entertain the possibility.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... On the Massachusetts frontier in April 1753, a famous preacher, known for his belief in an angry and highly selective God, sat in his Stockbridge study, writing a letter. In it, he described his neighbors, a group of unconverted Indians, as...

Thunderstorms & flying spiders: Edwards saw "the exuberant goodness of the creator" in every detail of the natural world.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... Puritans were "people of one Book," right? Not Jonathan Edwards. He was a person of two books: the Bible and the book of nature. Nature was the showplace of God's glory and the reflection of his beauty. In his Personal Narrative, the great...

Expert joy! Edwards found the Christian life sweet and said so at every opportunity.(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... A dour, killjoy Puritan. This is the image many have of Jonathan Edwards. After all, he's that fellow who preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," hanging his listeners over hell by a slender thread, right? His portrait seems to...

On his own terms: Edwards has much to say to us today, if we can get past his peculiar accent. (The Link Interview).(Jonathan Edwards)
February 1, 2003... Great thinkers like Jonathan Edwards can be hard to approach. Many who have read him are convinced that the Northampton divine has much to offer the church today. But he seems to float somewhere above us--severe, austere, out of reach. What a...

Jonathan Edwards. (Recommended Resources).(Bibliography)
February 1, 2003... An excellent way to get to know Edwards is through one of several modern biographies. Ola Winslow's Jonathan Edwards: 1703-1758 (Macmillan, 1940; Collier paperback, 1961) overcomes what now seems a dated style with memorable scene-setting and...