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Evangelical

Theologian of Trinitarian Love: Preaching Jonathan Edwards

June 12, 2011 by Daniel Harrell

Continued from Page 2

And because this personified idea of God is infinitely perfect and identical to God, it elicits love from God. God can't love Himself (that would be narcissism), but He does love the Son. And because God's love for the Son is also perfect love, and because God is love, that love between Father and Son is personified too. We call that love the Holy Spirit. Love, love, love.

The infinite happiness of God in community generates a delight that cannot be contained (for then God would be less happy, a logical impossibility). God's love radiates outward, emanating forth like a fountain. Edwards preached:

There is in heaven this fountain of love, this eternal three in one, set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it. There this glorious God is manifested and shines forth in full glory, in beams of love; there the fountain overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight, enough for all to drink at, and to swim in, yea, so as to overflow the world as it were with a deluge of love.

It was this unhindered, radiating deluge of love that resulted in creation. Trinitarian love is manifest in the interrelatedness of creation—nothing exists in pure independence. Trinitarian love is manifest in redemption that ushers saints into participation in God's overflowing happiness, a happiness that extends infinitely into eternity.

Edwards conceptualized heaven as the perfect world of love. Yet as an idealist, Edwards also believed that the perfect world of love need not wait until heaven. If love is God the Holy Spirit, then the same Spirit that unites God to himself in Triune relationship is the same love that unites God to humanity in the incarnation. He's the same love that unites God to redeemed sinners through the cross. Moreover, the Spirit is the same love that unites saints to each other in Christian community. And because love is God, it should look among Christians on earth as it does within God in heaven.

This "divine glory and sweetness" which infused believers elicited a new desire and capacity for love that would be evident in the way believers worshipped God and treated each other. Communal marks of love are signs of God's presence. During the Great Awakening, Edwards grew suspicious whenever people attested to individual conversion experiences but failed to exhibit any change in disposition toward their neighbor. There was no conversion without evidence of conversion that everyone could see. No love meant no Spirit.

Practical traces of Edwards' influence in this vein were visible at Park Street Church when I first arrived almost twenty years ago. Accustomed to the casual ease that joining a church entailed in most others I had attended, I was a bit taken aback by Park Street's requirement that I provide a detailed testimony of faith. But the real shaker was how this testimony had to be given before a committee of forty people, called the Conference Committee. The Conference Committee sat in this large circle, facing you as you told your story. Afterward, they were primed to ask questions so as to determine your spiritual fitness for church membership. Then they'd vote as to your faith's authenticity before allowing you to join.

Now in all fairness, I should say that the experience was never as intimidating as I'm making it sound; yet in an age when a person's personal discernment of belief is generally considered sufficient authentication, such an ostensibly judicial set-up was enough to deter many from ever pursuing membership at all. Becoming a Christian and joining the church isn't supposed to be hard! I remember trying to calm nervous new member candidates fearful of appearing before the Conference Committee. I'd comfort them by telling them how it used to be worse. In years prior, you used to have to haul along witnesses who could vouch they'd seen your faith in action. It's like James and John both asserted: what good is faith if it doesn't look like love? As Jesus said, you know a tree by its fruit.

Regrettably, it was Edwards' idealistic insistence on congruency between faith and life, between God's love in us and God's love flowing out from us that got him into trouble with his church. It happened over the communion table. For the Reformers, the communion table was understood as a means of grace, a remembrance of the body and blood of Christ sacrificed for sinners. Simultaneously, communion was also understood as an appetizer for the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the banquet that believers in Christ will enjoy with God and with each other in eternity. A healthy balance was kept between the table as food for sinners and feast for saints.

But Edwards, convinced that heaven should be enjoyed on earth, skewed his own interpretation toward the "feast for saints" end. For Edwards, the Lord's Supper became an expression of heaven already realized, the great eschatological banquet enjoined. As such, only Christians whose lives unmistakably evidenced God's love were permitted to partake. Who made this judgment? Well, Edwards himself did. As you might imagine, Edwards' actions caused among his congregation, he wrote, "an uncommon degree of rage and madness." Sixteen months later, he was dismissed.

Article Continued On Next Page

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6/12/2011 4:00:00 AM

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About Daniel Harrell

Daniel M. Harrell is Senior Minister of The Colonial Church, Edina, MN and author of How To Be Perfect: One Church's Audacious Experiment in Living the Old Testament Book of Leviticus (FaithWords, 2011). Follow him via Twitter, Facebook, or at his blog and website.

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