A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards
I was able to finish A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards by George Marsden a couple months ago shortly after the presidential elections. Tim Challies just posted a good review so I won’t try and summarize it except for a few bullet points that stuck me as I read it.
1) The remarkable battle for secularization and pluralism in the colonies well before the revolutionary war . – Marsden does an interesting bit in pitting Benjamin Franklin against Jonathan Edwards as these two great minds influenced the development and heritage of our country.
2) The strangely contemporary feeling of interchurch internal politics and struggle . Oddly the normally wise reflective Edwards does terribly at political moves that really hurt his chances for ministry. Sometimes I get this feeling that ministry should be totally spiritual – and to make moves that seem political or prudent or to “spin” things is wrong. But, it seems like those things would have saved Edwards ministry. He suffered a lot because of wrong perceptions.
3) The connection between the great awakening and the revolutionary war. This awakening influenced by Edwards and Whitfield – where salvation was more than citizenship, and perhaps even the pastor of your state church might not be a true believer – was the ideological seeds for the justification of revolution, and the foundation of the separation of church and state.
It made for a really interesting read. Read some sample pages here.
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