Morning Thanks--not just any Puritan preacher

Somehow, or so it seems, this portrait catches what I can't help but believe was the true Jonathan Edwards, the justly famous Puritan divine and one-time President of Princeton University. His eyes seem fixed, but there's nothing haughty or haunted about them. He appears not to be hectoring anyone, but listening, something only accomplished by capable men and women.

His lips are thin, which might signify the kind of tightness one always associates with Puritans; but they're not arched into either smile or frown. Instead, his whole face--his eyes are slightly widened--makes him appear healthily attentive. He wants to know, wants to learn. If Puritanism is the sneaking suspicion that someone somewhere is having a good time, as H. L. Mencken so famously said, this Edwards at least does not appear "Puritannical."

And he wasn't, though he was. For better and/or for worse, he will always be perceived as preacher who ranted on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," perhaps the only sermon right there in the canon of every high school anthology of American lit. And "Sinners" was his--of that there's no doubt. Edwards, more than any other Puritan prelate, awakened spirituality in the hearts and souls of his countrymen, and he did it, oddly enough, in a soft, almost feminine voice. He was no Billy Sunday, no Billy Graham, no Jerry Falwell. He didn't preach like a locker-room coach, or attempt to mimic the greatest pulpiteer of his time, George Whitefield, whose traveling salvation show packed city squares up and down the colonies.

The story goes that when he actually preached that sermon, parishioners might have found it difficult to hear, so quiet and unassuming was Edwards' voice. However, some claim that no one couldn't listen because the quality of his ideas--"There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God"--somehow resonated with the sleepy moral consciences of New Englanders who, in their quest for material gain, hadn't quite yet lost the cultural memory of what they all still recognized as their own "total depravity."

And thus, Jonathan Edwards "awakened" American's first "Great Awakening," which explains why the quintessential Calvinist theologian--none better during or immediately after his era--so honorably sits on display (or at least did, some years ago) in the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Quite simply, Edwards lit 'em up big time. From the pulpit, he lacked the crusading presence of a George Whitefield, but not the theological fervency, and he surpassed absolutely everyone is pure intellect.

As a brand new high school English teacher, way back when, I tried turning my classroom into Puritan meeting house, men on one side, women on the other. I borrowed a choir robe from the music department, put a cross up on the podium (probably not a Puritan affectation!), and told the kids that when I'd enter, I wanted them in austere silence before I'd deliver the most dramatic moments of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which I then did, yelling and screaming like a third-rate tub-thumper.

I had it all wrong. Edwards didn't scream out the horrors he wanted to use to introduce his people to their own dark and sinful selves, he let what he said do that work, rather than how he said it.

When I met with a bunch of them last year, a half-century later, some of them brought it up and broke into laughter. That's okay. They weren't derisive. What's soothed my soul was that they remembered the wild-eyed preacher at all.

I wanted them to understand this moment in their own American history because it was so powerfully formative, even if "the Puritan era" can be and has been blamed for just about every social ill from which this culture of ours suffers. And, I suppose, I wanted them to understand me, their first-year teacher, who, at 22 years old, was still wrestling with the twin towers of Edwards' faith, and mine--the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man.

That's a biggie, whether we're talking 17th or 21st century. 

How about this?--Jonathan Edwards on Donald J. Trump. Oh my, that's a sermon I'd attend.

This morning, this old Calvinist gives thanks for a theologian of towering intellect and significance in the American story, a famous Calvinist divine named the Reverend Jonathan Edwards.

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

Been a while since I've heard a sermon like that. Maybe that's good. Maybe not.