Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 25:2 (Summer 2021)
Article: The Angelology Of Jonathan Edwards
Author: Dustin W. Benge

SBJT 25:2 (Summer 2021) p. 105

The Angelology Of Jonathan Edwards

Dustin W. Benge

Dustin W. Benge is Associate Professor of Biblical Spirituality and Historical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He also earned his PhD from Southern Seminary. Dr. Benge is the author of The Loveliest Place (Crossway, 2022) and The American Puritans (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020). He is a senior fellow at The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He is married to Molli and they live in Louisville, Kentucky.

Christ is the head of the angels, and that the angels are united to him as part of his body.1 Jonathan Edwards

The work of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) served as a brilliant example of the vigor of the Puritans’ inherited Calvinism.2 Historian Mark Noll writes,

Twentieth-century students are partially correct in drawing attention to the modernity of Edwards’ intellectual universe, for he was influenced by the sensationalist epistemology of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, he marveled at the lofty regularities portrayed in Newton’s science, and he accepted the affectional emphases in the new moral philosophy of his age. But if he was the colonial American who most deeply engaged the new era’s thought, he was also the colonial American who most thoroughly repudiated it.3

While studying theology after his graduation from Yale College in 1720, Edwards experienced a conversion during which, as he later writes, “There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being.”4 To properly communicate this divine glory became his

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preeminent burden as a pastor-theologian. While pastoring the historical Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Edwards participated in intense seasons of revival in 1734–1735 and again in 1740–1742. Yet in 1750, Edwards was overwhelming dismissed from his pulpit in Northampton when he challenged the long-established practice of admitting individuals to the Lord’s table in communion when they could not give credible testimony as to the genuineness of their saving faith. This seeming crisis for Edwards and his large family, and subsequent move to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, proved to be the season in which he would finish several theological treatises for which he later won theological renown.5 On March 22, 1758, Edwards died...