He Really Believed Hell, Today Most Preachers Don’t

Three hundred years ago, on October 5, 1703, Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut. In honor of God’s providence in setting upon us in Church History such a theological giant as Jonathan Edwards, we at New.Demonstration will dedicate this week to the preaching and teaching of the Word through the life and works of Jonathan Edwards.

My topic is “The Pastor as Theologian, Reflections on the Life and Ministry of Jonathan Edwards.” One of Edwards’ books, written back in 1742, was recently reissued with an Introduction by Charles Colson. Colson wrote,

The western church – much of it drifting, enculturated, and infected with cheap grace – desperately needs to hear Edwards’ challenge. . . . It is my belief that the prayers and work of those who love and obey Christ in our world may yet prevail as they keep the message of such a man as Jonathan Edwards.

I assume that you are among that number who love and obey Christ and who long for your prayers and your work to prevail over unbelief and evil in your churches and your communities and eventually in the world. And I believe that Colson is right that Edwards has a challenge for us that can help us very much, not only in his message, but also in his life as a pastor-theologian.

The Real Jonathan Edwards

Most of us don’t know the real Jonathan Edwards. We all remember the high school English classes or American History classes. The text books had a little section on “The Puritans” or on “The Great Awakening.” And what did we read? Well, my oldest son is in the 9th grade now and his American History text book has one paragraph on the Great Awakening, which begins with the sentence that goes something like this: “The Great Awakening was a brief period of intense religious feeling in the 1730’s and ’40’s which caused many churches to split.”

And for many text books, Edwards is no more than a gloomy troubler of the churches in those days of Awakening fervor. So what we get as a sample of latter-day Puritanism is an excerpt from his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Perhaps one like this,

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousands times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

And so the kids are given the impression that Edwards was a gloomy, sullen, morose, perhaps pathological misanthrope who fell into grotesque religious speech the way some people fall into obscenity.

But no high school kid is ever asked to wrestle with what Edwards was wrestling with as a pastor. When you read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” you see quickly that Edwards was not falling into this kind of language by accident. He was laboring as a pastor to communicate a reality that he saw in Scripture and that he believed was infinitely important to his people.

And before any of us, especially us pastors, sniffs at Edwards’ imagery, we had better think long and hard what our own method is for helping our people feel the weight of the reality of Revelation 19:15 [show] [15]From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. (ESV)
. Edwards stands before this text with awe. He virtually gapes at what he sees here. John writes in this verse, “[Christ] will tread the wine press of the fierceness of the wrath of God the Almighty.”

Listen to Edwards’ comment in this sermon,

The words are exceeding terrible.

If it had only been said, “the wrath of God,” the words would have implied that which is infinitely dreadful: but it is “the fierceness and wrath of God!”

The fierceness of Jehovah!

O how dreadful must that be!

Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them?

What high school student is ever asked to come to grips with what really is at issue here? If the Bible is true, and if it says that someday Christ will tread his enemies like a winepress with anger that is fierce and almighty, and if you are a pastor charged with applying Biblical truth to your people so that they will flee the wrath to come, then what would your language be? What would you say to make people feel the reality of texts like these?

Edwards labored over language and over images and metaphors because he was so stunned and awed at the realities he saw in the Bible. Did you hear that one line in the quote I just read: “Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them?” Edwards believed that it was impossible to exaggerate the horror of the reality of hell.

High school teachers would do well to ask their students the really probing question, “Why is it that Jonathan Edwards struggled to find images for wrath and hell that shock and frighten, while contemporary preachers try to find abstractions and circumlocutions that move away from concrete, touchable Biblical pictures of unquenchable fire and undying worms and gnashing of teeth?”

If our students were posed with this simple, historical question, my guess is that some of the brighter ones would answer: “Because Jonathan Edwards really believed in hell, but most preachers today don’t.”

But no one has asked us to take Edwards seriously, and so most of us don’t know him.

Most of us don’t know that he knew his heaven even better than his hell, and that his vision of glory was just as appealing as his vision of judgment was repulsive.

Most of us don’t know that he is considered now by secular and evangelical historians alike to be the greatest Protestant thinker America has ever produced. Scarcely has anything more insightful been written on the problem of God’s sovereignty and man’s accountability than his book, The Freedom of the Will.

Most of us don’t know that he was not only God’s kindling for the Great Awakening, but also its most penetrating analyst and critic. His book called The Religious Affections lays bare the soul with such relentless care and Biblical honesty that, two hundred years later, it still breaks the heart of the sensitive reader.

Most of us don’t know that Edwards was driven by a great longing to see the missionary task of the church completed. Who knows whether Edwards has been more influential in his theological efforts on the freedom of the will and the nature of true virtue and original sin and the history of redemption, or whether he has been more influential because of his great missionary zeal and his writing the Life of David Brainerd.

Does any of us know what an incredible thing it is that this man, who was a small-town pastor for 23 years in a church of 600 people, a missionary to Indians for 7 years, who reared 11 faithful children, who worked without the help of electric light, or word-processors or quick correspondence, or even sufficient paper to write on, who lived only until he was 54, and who died with a library of 300 books – that this man led one of the greatest awakenings of modern times, wrote theological books that have ministered for 200 years and did more for the modern missionary movement than anyone of his generation?

His biography of the young missionary David Brainerd has been incalculable in its effect on the modern missionary enterprise. Almost immediately it challenged the spirit of God’s great adventurers. Gideon Hawley, one of Edwards’ missionary protégés carried it in his saddle bags and wrote in 1753 (even before Edwards’ death) when the strain was almost beyond endurance, “I need, greatly need, something more than human to support me. I read my Bible and Mr. Brainerd’s Life, the only books I brought with me, and from them have a little support.”

John Wesley put out a shortened version of Edwards’ Life of Brainerd in 1768, ten years after Edwards’ death. He disapproved of Edwards’ and Brainerd’s Calvinism, but he said, “Find preachers of David Brainerd’s spirit, and nothing can stand before them.”

The list of missionaries who testify to the inspiration of Brainerd’s Life through the work of Jonathan Edwards is longer than any of us knows: Francis Asbury, Thomas Coke, William Carey, Henry Martyn, Robert Morrison, Samuel Mills, Fredrick Schwartz, Robert M’Cheyne, David Livingstone, Andrew Murray. And a few days before he died, Jim Elliot, who was martyred by the Aucas, entered in his diary, “Confession of pride – suggested by David Brainerd’s Diary yesterday – must become an hourly thing with me.”

So for 250 years Edwards has been fueling the missionary movement with his biography of David Brainerd. And David Bryant today makes no secret out of the fact that Edwards’ book on concerts of prayer (The Humble Attempt) is the inspiration for his own effort in the prayer movement for awakening and world evangelization today. So Brainerd has been read and known for two centuries. And Edwards’ vision of united prayer is coming to life again in the person of David Bryant. But who knows the man who wrote these books?

Mark Noll, who teaches history at Wheaton and has thought much about the work of Edwards, describes the tragedy like this:

Since Edwards, American evangelicals have not thought about life from the ground up as Christians because their entire culture has ceased to do so. Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced world-view or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards’s perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.¹

—The Pastor as Theologian: Reflections on the Life and Ministry of Jonathan Edwards, a sermon delivered on April 15, 1988 by John Piper at the 1988 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

Full Sermon Preview:

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Read the whole of this most Christ exalting sermon on the apprehension of a greater and more glorious vision of God in our own personal lives, in ministry and in Christian living in general off the life of Jonathan Edwards, here. This sermon on Mr. Edwards’ life, divinity, and ministry has been a great rebuke and help to me. It is my hope and prayer that you would be far more blessed than I have in your reading or listening to this sermon. You can download it here also in mp3.

Sermon Preview of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: [mp3]

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1. Quoted in “Jonathan Edwards, Moral Philosophy, and the Secularization of American Christian Thought,” Reformed Journal (February 1983):26. Emphasis mine. [↩]

FeebleSaint (JM Vergara) is an aspiring Christian blogger. A sinner saved by God's sovereign grace. An Engineer. A GFX afficionado. A lay-theologian. Nothing but a Feeble Saint. Find me on: Twitter - Facebook - Plurk - Multiply - Youtube - email