'Why should twenty-first century Christians listen to
Jonathan Edwards?
After all, Edwards was born three hundred years ago in
an obscure Connecticut town. He never benefited from a laptop, a microphone, Google or American Airlines. Colonial New England knew nothing of automobiles, credit cards, iPods, cell phones or professional sports. The powdered wigs that grace surviving portraits of early eighteenth-century aristocrats seem to relay not only an outer sternness but also an inner austerity to match.
Yet Jonathan Edwards must be heard today. Not
because he was an intellectual giant (though he was); nor because secular academicians, owning no interest in the Saviour for whom he poured out his life, revere him as the greatest philosopher-theologian in American history (though they do); nor because he wrote with singular beauty of prose (he did not).
Jonathan Edwards must be heard today because he
exhaled the air of eternity as one intoxicated with the
resplendent beauty of the immortal God in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This was his all-consuming passion as he lived under an awareness of and enthralment with God foreign to vast portions of the church today.'
Dane Ortlund
