Sunday, February 8, 2009

Jonathan Edwards' Thoughts on Controversial Doctrines

This was worth typing out in order to share:

"All the controversial doctrines that he defended were teachings he held simply because he was sure they were taught in Scripture. God's sovereignty in choosing those whom to save, the imputation of Adam's sin to the whole race, the unacceptability in God's eyes of even the best natural virtue, the chasm between the regenerate and the unregenerate, the eternity of punishment for sin, and much else were biblical teaching one might not dare ignore, however mysterious or unreasonable they might seem. Edwards spent much intellectual energy arguing that these revealed doctrines were reasonable, or at least not necessarily unreasonable, and that therefore they could be consistent with the moral government of a benevolent deity.

In that concern - to justify the ways of God to man - Edwards was akin to the philosopher-theologians of his age, yet he radically differed from most of his contemporaries in that he was not willing to judge God by eighteenth-century standards of moral law. God, for Edwards, was not to be understood something like the most virtuous of all humans. Rather, because Edwards took so seriously the immensity of gap between the ways of the infinite and eternal God and the limits of human understanding, he was willing to make the best of the biblical accounts, as counterintuitive as they might sometimes seem. Upon rigorous examinition, he consistently claimed, those accounts could be proved more consistent with reason and experience than any alternatives, even if deep mysteries remained." (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, p478)

I'm afraid I often judge God by my own standards while forgetting the immense gap between His ways and my ways.

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