Jonathan Edwards And A Divine And Supernatural Light -- By: Kevin C. Carr

Journal: Puritan Reformed Journal
Volume: PRJ 02:2 (Jul 2010)
Article: Jonathan Edwards And A Divine And Supernatural Light
Author: Kevin C. Carr


Jonathan Edwards And A Divine And Supernatural Light

Kevin C. Carr

The Reformation focused on the doctrine of justification, recovering the ground of the gospel. The Great Awakening focused on the doctrine of regeneration, recovering the experience of the gospel. The theology of the sixteenth-century Reformation found expression in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Mediated through the Puritans, that same Calvinism shed light on the eighteenth-century revivals through the writings of Jonathan Edwards. If Calvin was a city planner and the Puritans built the infrastructure, Edwards turned the lights on. In his 1976 lecture at the annual Puritan and Westminster Conference in London, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones insists, “In Edwards we come to the very zenith or acme of Puritanism.... I would assert that Puritanism reached its fullest bloom in the life and ministry of Jonathan Edwards.”1

The purpose of this article is to highlight the sermon from the massive Edwards anthology which best serves to locate him as the theologian of the Revival period. In 1733, during his early years as pastor of the Northampton Church when the first stirrings of revival were evident, Edwards preached a sermon which became paradigmatic for his later revival writings, and perhaps his entire legacy. The following year, the sermon became his second published work under the title, A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to be both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine. George M. Marsden, historian, biographer, and University of

Notre Dame scholar, claims, “This sermon, A Divine and Supernatural Light, encapsulates better than any other single source the essence of his spiritual insight. In it he provided a sort of constitution for any true awakening.”2 The late Perry Miller (1905-1963), Pulitzer Prize winner in history and leading authority on New England Puritanism, writes concerning A Divine and Supernatural Light:

It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Edwards’ system is contained in miniature within some ten or twelve pages in this work. Yet it…is a puzzle. Edwards was not the sort who undergoes a long development or whose work can be divided into “periods.” His whole insight was given him at once, preternaturally early, and he did not change: he only deepened.... [H]e altered little from his adolescence at Yale to his death in Prince­ton. His works are statement and restatement of an essentially static conception, worked over and over, as upon a photographic plate, to bring out more detail o...

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