Edwards for us

Christian Century, Oct 4, 2003 by Max L. Stackhouse

THE PURITANS were earnest folk. They had little patience with those who had no depth, no deep conviction, no profound concern with what God was doing in their lives. They wanted everyone to become a believer, of course--to assent to the reality of God and God's providence, justice and compassion, and thus find a confidence for living in this precarious world. Those in drift could not do that; they were like a bug on a leaf in a river during a storm. They had no sense of where they were or where they were going.

Jonathan Edwards was, to put it mildly, religiously serious, and he was so from an early age. He is so interesting for contemporary theologians because he developed a balance of brilliant intellectual honesty, fidelity to the biblical traditions, and an openness to new insight brought by personal experience.

He reports that it was some verses in Paul's Letters to Timothy that helped him sort his faith out. Paul writes about how as a young man he himself had been something of a holy terror, but when he received God's mercy he learned of the "love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith." He was so grateful that he could write: "To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever." That text, Edwards said, changed his life.

Three themes are embedded in this story about Edwards's development that are pertinent to the work he did the rest of his life and to a serious faith. Those themes are free will, love and glory.

When we are drifting through life, or being cynical, the question arises: Can we simply will to change our ways? When we feel far from God, can we just decide to reestablish a relationship? Of course, in daily life, we often have real choices--whether I should go out with this person, whether I should accept this job, whether I should use what money I have this way or that. But do we have the will to alter the basic course of our lives?

Many people, when they look back on the choices they have made, see that many "free" decisions were in fact in the cards before the decisions were made. Often we just have to sort out what is really going on in life. And that is the issue: How deeply embedded in the conditions of our lives is the freedom of our wills?

We need to honor and protect our political freedoms, and hold people morally and in some cases legally accountable for their decisions; but we ought not overestimate the will's powers. The will needs guidance and support from the mind and the heart, and, even more, from a power beyond ourselves. AA knows this, as do all the effective self-help groups. It is not all self-help! All the great religions also point to a power beyond our own will. And the believer comes to know that support and power can come to us, by God's grace.

Edwards knew how complicated this simple fact can be. One of his most famous works is The Freedom of the Will, in which he argues that the will is truly free when it is in accord with what God intends for us; otherwise it loses itself in drift or cynical arrogance. This approach puts the issue in a theological framework. Many today fear profound religious commitment as loss of autonomy, and others fear that it breeds terror. But that is not what Edwards thought profound religion is about. True religion, he thought, energizes the will. And he thought true religion always involves love and beauty.

NO ONE IS against love, I take it. But there is a good bit of confusion about what the Puritans thought about love. Essentially, love is the inner power that draws persons together and bonds them to each other and to the right and the good. It shows up in many forms. It appears in acts of charity when we give to those in need. It draws us to particular persons whom we recognize as a gift to us from God. Most important, it takes shape when we discern the love of' God for us and respond in love of God. In all these forms, love gives shape to the moral life, in that we become bound into appropriate covenants of mutual obligation and fidelity under God. Tree love penetrates the heart and reorients the will.

It is sometimes said that the Puritans were prudes about sexual love and had a repressive view of sexuality. This is simply not so. Some people, reacting against the prudery of the Victorian era and the moralistic legalism into which some churches had devolved, blamed the Puritans, and tried to liberate sexuality from all religious constraint. It is as if they set aside a zone of life and said, "No religions ethics allowed here." Some have tried this in other areas also. Well, they have been successful in many respects, but the liberation has gone in unanticipated directions. It has brought us record numbers of divorces, absentee dads, troubled kids and the scourge of AIDS, Do we really want to liberate ourselves from all religious constraints?

Puritans had a dim view of extramarital relations, but that was because they had a very high view of sexuality in marriage. Love, like the will, needs boundaries and channels; it needs a trusting and trustworthy context. The scholar Edmund Leites has studied hundreds of Puritan sermons about love and sex (there are many), and he has documented how much they preached about the duties to desire and how they saw the marriage bed as the "other ,altar of love." (The communion altar, of course, is the first.) But they also knew that love, if it is to be sacred, needs a deep set of moral rudders. It needs to be modeled on the way God loves us. For nurturing awareness of the love of God, a vibrant community of faith is needed. For nurturing the love between persons, a faithful marriage is the context.