Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 77:1 (Spring 2015)
Article: Spite Or Spirit? Jonathan Edwards On The Imprecatory Language In The Psalms
Author: David P. Barshinger

WTJ 77:1 (Spring 2015) p. 53

Spite Or Spirit? Jonathan Edwards On The Imprecatory Language In The Psalms

David P. Barshinger

David P. Barshinger is adjunct professor of church history at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill., and an editor in the book division at Crossway in Wheaton, Ill. This article is adapted from his book Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Used by permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

The imprecatory language in the Psalms constitutes one of the most scandalous themes in the Bible. Today, many churches and lectionaries avoid it altogether. Writers of modern hymns and praise songs, who frequently draw on the Psalms, rarely include the Psalter’s imprecatory language in their musical renditions, in a sense sanitizing the worship of the church. On the other hand, we see such passages referenced in popular culture to discredit Christians and their Bible.1 This language of calling God to inflict violence on one’s enemies raises a challenge to Christians who hold to the authority of the Bible. But the challenge is not new. Many interpreters throughout the history of the church have acknowledged it and addressed it.

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) offers an example of one such interpreter who wrestled with the difficulty that these texts present and interpreted the imprecatory psalms theologically. In this article I aim to explore how Edwards treated the imprecatory language of the Psalms throughout his corpus. In doing so, I will examine in detail a specific theme he treated to fill out our understanding of Edwards’s lifelong engagement with the Bible—a need in the literature as Edwards’s voluminous biblical writings are only beginning to be given the serious attention they deserve.2 I will also compare him to four

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interpreters within his Reformed stream of interpretation—Matthew Henry (1662–1714), Matthew Poole (1624–1679), David Dickson (1583–1663), and John Calvin (1509–1564)—to see lines of continuity and discontinuity with that tradition of exegesis.3 In the course of the article, I suggest that Stephen Stein’s account of Edwards’s interpretation of the Psalms’ imprecatory language—the only other scholarly account of this topic—fails to do justice to the multilayered explanation Edwards gave of this violent language, and also argue that Edwards’s approach to this quandary was largely in line with that of his Reformed exegetical predecessors.

My thesis is that Jonathan Edwa...