the theology of jonathan edwards lesson 03 of 24 · so fascinated by jonathan edwards acknowledge...

Transcript - CH504 The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

© 2015 Christian University GlobalNet. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 03 of 24CH504

Doctrine of Scripture, Part 1

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

John H. Gerstner, PhD, DD

Experience: Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

This is the third lecture in our series on the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and it concerns his view of Holy Scripture. Let us pray. O God our Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast given us Thy holy Word inspired by Thy Holy Spirit and hath also given us able [minds] such as Edwards with their great genius and even greater spiritual submissiveness to probe its pages and expound its sublime gospel. Bless us that we may learn from him about Thy Word. For Christ’s sake we ask it. Amen.

As we mentioned in the last lecture, Jonathan Edwards was a rational theologian who believed that a good deal could be learned about God and man and even morals by man in his natural, even though fallen, condition. We pointed out that the fall had, according to Edwards, not destroyed man’s mind but destroyed his heart spiritually and that he was therefore able to understand natural and even special revelation but was not at all disposed to welcome it but used his brain in trying to give arguments against it being God and God’s revelation. But Edwards’s mind was opened by the Spirit to reception of divine truth and the recognition of the inspiration of Scripture. And we have from him a very thorough development of this doctrine and defense as well. It’s a rather interesting thing that the sort of academic elite who have become so fascinated by Jonathan Edwards acknowledge this feature in Edwards—that he was a fundamentalist in the sense of believing in the Scripture’s inspiration and inerrancy.

When Perry Miller died, who was a general editor, his successor was the present general editor, Professor John E. Smith, who teaches philosophy at Yale University as well. In an article in the Review of Metaphysics where he discusses Edwards’s overall theology, he makes this very candid statement. “Edwards accepted totally the tradition established by the reformers with respect to the absolute primacy and authority of the Bible. And he could approach the biblical writings with that conviction of their inerrancy and literal truth.” I think that is not only a true statement about Jonathan Edwards, but it’s a genuine tribute

Transcript - CH504 The Theology of Jonathan Edwards © 2015 Christian University GlobalNet. All rights reserved.


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to John E. Smith and to the editors of the Yale University Press edition of the works of Edwards that know this doctrine. And many other doctrines Edwards teaches are repugnant to them. They are scholars enough to admit that it was very attractive to Jonathan Edwards. This is a painting of Edwards with warts and all as far as they’re concerned. As far as we persons who share his view, we are all the happier that a man of this prodigious ability and this general recognition even by the enemy of these doctrines is granted.

They say this, therefore, in our exposition of Edwards’s thinking about the Bible something about the nature of inspiration as he understood it. Does his view of revelation, for which he has shown the necessity and evidence and reasonableness in other writings, does that imply divine dictation? We have seen Edwards argue that God would have to provide evidence that He was speaking. I mentioned to you in the last lecture that Edwards maintained that philosophy and theology were mutually complementary not contradictory. And that while Barth would say to be a Christian you can’t be philosophical, to be philosophical you can’t be Christian, Edwards would say just the opposite. To be Christian you really have to be soundly philosophical, and if you are soundly philosophical you will be a Christian.

So the question here is how would this philosopher-theologian justify a belief which is generally very repugnant to philosopher-theologians of our time, namely, the inspiration of the Bible and how would he view it? Specifically granted that he acknowledges inerrancy, does he believe in the dictation view of inspiration? If God did speak through human agents, would He have to dictate this message? Again I cite Richard Sibbes of the preceding century in Britain, articulating a characteristic Puritan viewpoint. Sibbes didn’t hesitate to affirm the dictation view of the inspiration. I quote him. He says, “Isaiah was the penman, God the mouth. The head dictateth. The hand writeth.” A man who’s sometimes called the father of Puritanism and was highly respected by Jonathan Edwards, William Perkins, insisted that “the whole disposition, thereof [speaking about the Bible] the whole disposition thereof with the style and the phrase was set down by the Holy Ghost.” This leads the historian, Knappen, to say that “in all but name the Tudor Puritans held the dictation theory of inspiration.” Did Edwards hold it is the question? He had a well-known respect for his Reformed father and his Reformed fathers in the faith.



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And this is what Edwards wrote on one occasion. “Ministers are not to preach those things which their own wisdom or reason suggests but the things that are already dictated to them by the superior wisdom and knowledge of God.” That word dictate and its cognates occur throughout this particular ordination sermon I’ve quoted. Nevertheless, there’s no laboring of the word dictation or its meaning. There was no use of the correlative amanuensis or secretary. In fact, apart from the word itself, there is no hint of mechanical inspiration in Jonathan Edwards. On the other hand, Edwards assumes that the words of Scripture are the very words of the Holy Spirit. They could not be more so if they were literally dictated is his basic position. And 2 Peter 1:20 are not merely, according Edwards, Peter’s words. And then he explains that that expression, the private interpretation of no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, is interpreted this way.

He says, and I’m quoting now, “It is not men’s speaking their own sense of things or interpreting their own minds, but the mind of God. That which is their sense is not always the sense or interpretation of Scripture but that which was the sense of the Holy Ghost. The prophets did not always perceive the meaning of their own prophecies.” His reasoning seems to be this. The words of the text are the words of the Holy Spirit, and the forbidden “private interpretation” is a substitution of one’s own wisdom for the wisdom of God. Edwards is not opposed to private interpretation in the historic Protestant meaning of private judgment. In fact he’s practicing it here. It is his own private judgment that private interpretation in the text does not refer to a proper interpretation which is expected of every individual who reads the words but a substitution of that individual’s opinions for the opinions of the Holy Spirit.

Once when I was a pastor, I had a secretary of the board of a church which I served who tended to write the minutes not of the meeting that happened but of the meeting that he thought should have happened. He quietly, unconsciously, substituted his own wisdom for what he thought was the non-wisdom of the meeting. I thought myself that he often was wiser than the board. But as pastor, I had to remind him that his duty was to record what the board did, not what he thought the board should have done. So Edwards in a sense is saying we must interpret what the infinitely wise Holy Spirit said through Peter and not what we think he should have said.



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Edwards also frequently speaks of the “penmen” of the Bible and says that the Holy Ghost uses the expressions attributed to the human writers. Nevertheless, Edwards obviously did not believe in mechanical inspiration. The way in which inspiration is supposed by Edwards to have come about can best be stated in the mind (in his work on the mind) and a later one in the Miscellanies. The first shows how the inspired person himself encountered the Deity, the second how he went about communicating the message received from the Deity. See how he says that inspiration actually came about. I’m quoting him now.

The evidence of immediate inspiration that the prophets had when they were immediately inspired by the Word of God with any truth is an absolute sort of certainty. And the knowledge is in a sense intuitive much in the same manner as faith and spiritual knowledge of the truth of religion. [He means the Christian religion there.] Such bright ideas are raised in such a clear view of a perfect agreement with the excellencies of the Divine nature that it is known to be a communication from God. All the Deity appears in the thing and in everything pertaining to it. The prophet has so divine a sense, such a divine disposition, such a divine pleasure. [I can’t help but say as an aside there you no-tice the divine pleasure even on the part of the inspired apostles. Edwards never develops that, but I can’t help but surmise that he’s thinking at the time that these apostles and others who receive the divine communication didn’t merely receive it as secretaries but as persons who were in communion and joy with the Communicator.] And he sees the recipient of the revelation so divine an excellency and so divine a power in what is revealed that he sees as imme-diately that God is there as we perceive one another’s pres-ence when we are talking together face to face. And our features, our voice, and our shapes are not so clear mani-festations of us as those spiritual resemblances of God that are in the inspiration are manifestations of Him.

But yet there are doubtless various degrees of inspiration or various degrees of divine communication along with them—you see is what he is saying. Now these bright ideas that Edwards speaks of that are so naturally supernaturally and supernaturally naturally given that anything that sounds like dictation seems out of this world of inspiration altogether. Such inspiration and dictation would seem to be opposites rather than correlatives or synonyms. When dictation is mentioned, one at least in the



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twentieth century thinks of shorthand note taking or clanging of keys of a typewriter or a computer, not “intuitive, spiritual knowledge” affording a “clear view of excellency.” But second, notice how the revelation once so naturally supernaturally communicated by God is naturally supernaturally articulated by man.

In the case of Solomon’s writing of his Song of Songs, this is the way Edwards describes it. I’ll read it and ask the listener here to see whether this is what is usually meant by the dictation theory of inspiration. The man who is writing here is a man who does not hesitate to use the word dictate and makes it very, very clear that these words are the words of the Holy Spirit. The thing I’m trying to labor here is to show you what seems to me to be evident here that Edwards is convinced of two things: one that the product of the originally inspired Scriptures is nothing less than the words of God. But the way by which they are communicated as well as inscribed are most natural, utterly characteristic, as shall I say, spontaneous. And it would be conceivable that they could be. You just listen to his description of Solomon’s writing in the Song of Songs and see whether indeed it’s so.

I imagine that Solomon when he wrote this song, being a very philosophical, musing man and a pious man and of a very loving temper, set himself in his own musings to imag-ine and to point forth to himself a pure, virtuous, pious, and entire love and represented the musings and feelings of his mind and in a philosophical and religious frame was carried away in a sort of transport. And in that, his mus-ings and the train of his imaginations were guided and led on by the Spirit of God. Solomon in his wisdom and great experience had learned the vanity of all other love and that of such a one. God’s Spirit made use of his loving inclina-tion joined with his musing philosophical disposition and so directed and conducted it in this train of imagination as to represent the love that there is between Christ and His spouse. God saw it very needful and exceeding useful that there should be some such representation of it. The rela-tion that there is between Christ and the church we know is very often compared to that that there is between a man and his wife. Yea this similitude is abundantly insisted on almost everywhere in Scripture and a virtuous and pious and pure love between a man and his spouse is very much of an image of the love between Christ and the church so that it is not at all strange that the Spirit of God which is



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love should direct a holy, amorous disposition after such a manner as to make such a representation that is very agreeable to other like representations

What I’m asking the listener to judge is whether you could believe if I hadn’t told you beforehand that the writer of those words about Solomon and his inspired recording of the Song of Songs was the writing of a man who believed in a dictation theory of inspiration. Edwards did. He believed those words that Solomon wrote were Solomon’s words, but they were the Holy Spirit’s words. They were given infallibly and inerrantly by the divine Spirit yet in a way that is so smoothly integrated. The natural lifestyle and pattern of thought and philosophical expression of Solomon that you’d almost think they were merely Solomon’s, whereas Edwards speaks almost as if they were merely God’s. Of course I’d say that’s a true view of inerrancy. I’m an inerrantist myself, and I know full well that’s what I think of it in my own humble way and so on. But it seems to me that we basically entertain a caricature of the doctrine and that we who in the twentieth century defend inerrancy have to spend a great deal of time saying that we don’t believe in dictation.

Jim Packer puts about seven or eight pages in the appendix at the end of his book on Fundamentalism and the Word of God to show that fundamentalism which believes the Word of God as the inerrant inspiration of Him at the same time do not believe in dictation. Because Dr. Packer recognizes that when most people hear the word dictation they can’t imagine any kind of real, spontaneous, characteristic, typical expression on the part of the inspired person who is himself articulating the words of Divine dictation. But Edwards had no trouble with that. Maybe the eighteenth century didn’t have as much trouble as we have in the twentieth century. I’ll simply say this as I let this subject go: Edwards clearly was talking about something which would amount to inspiration of the dictation sort in the sense that the words are as much God’s Word as if He wrote them with His own finger. And at the same time, he thinks in terms of the way in which God actually did communicate them in as spontaneous a way as if the writer had done it entirely on his own. Now there are many other aspects of Edwards which I can’t talk about here. I’ve written a series for a . . . magazine that appeared in 1980 on the different aspects of this matter, and I can’t even begin to cover all of those. But I would suggest that those of you who want to probe more aspects of that particular view of Edwards than I can develop here might want to look at that essay on some occasion.



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But one of the other things which I must bring out to you when I talk about the Edwardsian view of the inspiration of Scripture is this. Edwards was living, as you know, in the eighteenth century when what we today tend to call higher criticism, and we really shouldn’t use that word. We mean lower, base type of criticism as a matter of fact. We mean negative type of criticism, though as a science, higher criticism is a perfectly respectable procedure trying to determine dates and that type of thing. But it becomes so associated with an evolutionary view hostile to any kind of special revelation down from above that it’s gotten a bad name itself. Edwards lived in the days when that was beginning to come in power. He died, remember, about a full century before Charles Darwin wrote his Origin of Species.

But evolutionary type of thinking had been current for a long time before that, and Astruc and people like that had begun to make that type of criticism which was going to get a great deal of impetus from the evolutionary developments of the nineteenth century and the Graf-Wellhausen theory and so on. But these critical positions were by no means unknown in the eighteenth century, and Jonathan Edwards was by no means insensitive to them. He realized very well that these criticisms about discrepancies and inconsistencies and developments from almost aboriginal views to lofty, divine disclosures and so on, they had to be answered. They had to be dealt with. I have a sneaking feeling that if he were living today, he would certainly be a member of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy laboring very strenuously against the various attacks of our time.

But what I’m trying to say to you now is he was doing it two hundred years ago in a very, very thorough way. Take, for example, a matter of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. He has a very extensive, lengthy miscellaneous type of treatment of it that covers almost all the bases on the issues. And I don’t think James Orr read it as “Problem of the Old Testament.” But he could very well have done so. He certainly didn’t do a much more thorough [study] of the fundamental principle of multiple authorship of the Pentateuch than Jonathan Edwards did back in his century. We don’t have time for that. He devotes quite a bit of space to dealing with the meaning of Jephthah’s vow to show that Jephthah never did vow that he would actually sacrifice the first person who came out of the room and had actually slaughtered his daughter. But Edwards does it in as meticulous a way that any critic of biblical research would have admired tremendously. Likewise, he deals with any number of inerrancies. Here we have to remember



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the man’s on the edge of civilization. He doesn’t have the kind of library they had in London or in Europe. He’s hard-pressed. I didn’t mention this before, but he had his antenna out all the time for new books. He had his friends getting them for him. And there were people in Scotland who recognized his genius, were seeing to it that he was getting certain books.

So he had a very reputable library for a man on the edge of things, but at the same time nothing comparable to what would today be considered a good theological library. But he was aware of the problems, and he relied on people who knew more about them than he did and would be very critical even of the way in which they handle them and frequently would make improvements on their type of thinking. He deals with all sorts of questions that Reimarus is going to make famous in the next century. You remember that famous work of Schweitzer was entitled A Quest for the Historical Jesus from Reimarus to Wrede. How Reimarus was raising questions about conflicts in the resurrection story that Edwards was dealing with long before that type of problem came along.

Since I can’t deal with all of these questions and want nevertheless to give you some idea of how Edwards went about it, I think what I’m going to try to do here in this last part of the lecture is to briefly get before you one of the most devastating criticisms of a thesis that’s as current, axiomatic, and taken for granted today that’s utterly detrimental to the idea of the inspiration of the Bible that we have and that Edwards refutes in a way so thorough that in my opinion it has no excuse for existence today. So let me give you one example of Jonathan Edwards as a biblical critic. As I say, he deals with many biblical problems, the Pentateuch, the discrepancies, and so on. But here is one of the major problems of his time and our time as well, namely, this matter of whether the apostles erred in saying in the Scriptures that Jesus Christ was going to return in their own generation. Edwards states that problem in one of his Miscellanies, and he addresses some seventeen or eighteen answers to that. And I’ll let the hearer judge whether these be not sound refutations of the criticism that the apostles were mistaken and the New Testament was mistaken in saying that Jesus Christ was going to return in that particular generation.

Edwards mentions first of all the rather obvious fact that all that Paul is saying in 1 Thessalonians that raises the whole problem is this. “For this we say unto you,” writes Paul to the Thessalonians, “by the Word of the Lord that we which are alive and remain unto



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the coming of the Lord shall not prevent or precede them which are asleep.” Now that’s the locus of the whole problem. You see Paul is saying there literally that “we which are alive” seems to give the impression that he insists it will be in his own generation while he is actually alive. Te first thing that Edwards says on that point is that this is just a way of referring to the uncertainty of the time that was the ground for the apostles using of that language. And it’s a difference between not knowing when Christ is coming and inferring that Christ is coming at a particular time. Then again he gives this other illustration how in the Old Testament Joseph said to his brethren, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from hence.” And as Edwards very indisputably observes Joseph wasn’t saying by that language that those people to whom he spoke would be the people who were delivered and returned to the land. But nevertheless they were the ones to whom he spoke when he said that God will surely visit “you.” But there’s no reason for assuming that he thought it was that particular generation which he was speaking.

The next observation which Edwards points out is that the man of sin as described in the second chapter of the second epistle to the Thessalonians clearly takes some time for his appearing and that Paul is saying in that connection that he had already indicated that to the Thessalonians when he was there even before the writing of the first letter to the Thessalonians so that there was no ground for their assuming that Christ would actually return so quickly as all that. Another point of critical significance that Edwards observes is that this second letter to the Thessalonians was not written a long time after, as if Paul had been embarrassed by the fact that so much time had gone by and Jesus Christ had not returned. This was written almost immediately afterwards. He was still in Athens when he wrote this. And apparently what precipitated the letter was the fact that he had gotten word that these people in Thessalonica had misunderstood him, so he immediately writes back. Edwards doesn’t say this, but I can’t help but think of the fact that near the end of his life Augustine wrote his famous Retractationes going over his whole corpus of writing to see if he had made any mistakes. And people were apparently thinking Paul was doing the same thing. He was making some retractions or changing.



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But as Edwards points out, this was done on the spur of the moment. He was still in Greece. It was just a little while after he had been there, and he was aghast that the Thessalonians had misunderstood him. This isn’t Paul in Rome shortly before his execution decades later realizing that of course because Christ hadn’t returned he’d better change some of his earlier statements. This was Paul flabbergasted that the Thessalonians had misunderstood what he had made very plain to them only a little while before. As a matter of fact Edwards goes on to point out that in 1 Corinthians 6:14 Paul uses this kind of language and says, “God hath both raised up the Lord and will also raise up us by His own power.” Nobody suggests for a moment that there Paul is insisting that he’ll necessarily be dead, but he does say at the same time that he’s going to be raised up if that us is going to have to refer literally to his own power. He’s simply talking about the fact of what is going to happen when Christ does return whoever happens to be on the scene at the time.

His next observation on this point is that it’s only a cursory view that would lead one to suppose that Paul was literally saying that Jesus Christ would return in his own lifetime. This reminds me of a professor I had at Harvard years ago, William Ernest Hocking, who in his lectures and in his books used to talk about the philosophy of the first glance. And he pointed out that that philosophy of the first glance was quite frequently wrong and that it was a second glance that showed that the first glance was cursory and superficial and was not really getting the impact. In a certain sense, that’s what Edwards is saying here. The critic who sees this as some sort of indication that Paul is teaching the imminent return of Jesus Christ in his own generation is suffering from the philosophy of the first glance. A more careful reading will show anybody that Paul is not insisting on any such thing as that at all.

As a matter of fact, what Paul is teaching throughout his writings, says Jonathan Edwards in his next point, is that it’s a duty of Christians to look and wait for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he cites Titus 2:13, 1 Corinthians 1:7, Philippians 3:20, Romans 13:11–12, and so on. The point is that the day of Christ’s kingdom, which is the day of the salvation [of] the church of Christ, was at hand, according to Jonathan Edwards and his understanding of this matter. Incidentally that last text he cites from Romans 13 is what, as you know, was used by God for the conversion of the great Augustine, who never for a moment thought that Christ’s return was imminent but that he himself



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was in the day of the Lord. And it was indeed for him the day of the Lord when he came to the Lord.

Edwards then goes on to the Old Testament to show that this was a very common way of speaking. Thus he cites, for example, Haggai 2:6–7, “For thus saith the LORD of hosts; ‘Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come.’” And again Malachi 3:1, “The LORD, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple.” And Edwards points out that there were centuries before that sudden coming took place and before this “little while” was fulfilled so that the readers of the Bible were well-acquainted with the notion that such language didn’t signify a period of, say, forty years or a generation. Then he cites of course the well-known language of the apostle Peter, “A thousand years in God’s sight are but as one day,” to indicate that kairos or time of God is not always the time of man. He gives some other illustrations along that same line.

His eleventh argument here is from 1 Corinthians 10:11. “And they are written [that is, these Old Testament admonitions] for our [New Testament people’s] admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” And here Edwards with his vast knowledge of the Old Testament and its relationship to the New is pointing out that that description in the Pentateuch of the experiences of the people of Israel in the desert were primarily not for their benefit but for the benefit of the people of the New Testament upon whom the ends of the world are come. This biblical language, in other words, is talking of ages and not necessarily generations.

He goes on in point number 12 to cite 1 Peter 4:7, “The end of all things is at hand.” What does Peter mean by saying “the end of all things is at hand”? Peter explains it in 2 Peter 3:7–8: “But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years,” and so on. Edwards said it’s to be considered that the apostle Peter was under no temptation to change his voice in this matter from any experience of the events failing to come to pass as yet. He had not lived long enough to prove but that Christ’s words lest any may suppose they may expect Christ’s coming before the generation passed away that before some were then present to taste of death might be fulfilled in this sense, that the whole world has to come to a cataclysmic ending before this type of thing happened. That was the mind of the apostle Peter. And Edwards is suggesting that



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we can’t argue that it was any otherwise with Paul.

ttIn the thirteenth argument he goes on to consider the apostle John and the famous statement that Christ had said, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” and how that false rumor got abroad in the early Christian church that Christ had said He would return before John had died. John himself, points out Edwards, corrected that say that Jesus didn’t say that He was going to come before John died. He said, “What is that to you, Peter?” whether when I do come and so on.

The fourteenth argument: he cites John again this time to show more positively the way John uses the language. In Revelation 3:11 he quotes Christ as saying, “Behold, I come quickly.” And John uses it repeatedly. He says at the end of the book after he had given account of those future events in the last chapter, verse 7, “Behold, I come quickly.” Again, behold, I come quickly. “He that testifieth these things says surely I come quickly.” And yet, Jonathan Edwards and most scholars of Revelation would agree with something like this, though there’d be some difference of interpretation, the seventh chapter of the book of Revelation alone is sufficient to convince anyone that John could not suppose that his prophecies could be fulfilled but in successive ages, certainly not in that generation.

The fifteenth point that Edwards makes is that this was referring to the church, and the church prevailed. She didn’t collapse because Christ didn’t come in that generation. She went about her job, and she grew immensely long after that generation had passed away. So she obviously was not a frustrated and disappointed body of people who cease to exist because her hopes were dashed.

The sixteenth argument is this: that Christ often speaks of His last coming as that which shall be long delayed. And Edwards cites the parable of the ten virgins: while the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. And again in the parable of the vineyard, after a long time the Lord of those servants cometh, and so on.

The seventeenth argument is this. It is evident that when Christ speaks of His coming, of His being revealed, of His coming in His kingdom or His kingdom coming, He has a respect to His appearing in those great works of His power, justice, and grace which should be in the destruction of Jerusalem and extraordinary providences. And he gives a number of illustrations of that which I don’t have time for here. But Edwards’s point is this: that the coming of the kingdom, though it refers climactically to the second coming of Jesus Christ, it does not refer exclusively to that. And, as a matter

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Doctrine of Scripture, Part 1Lesson 03 of 24

of fact, there are many phrases of coming of the Lord which refer to things like the destruction of Jerusalem or some other cataclysmic event, so that one cannot conclude that the coming of the Lord in every biblical instance must necessarily mean a coming in a particular generational period.

His conclusion in 18 and 19 is this, from this it follows. Says Edwards, “That when Christ speaks of His coming [His coming and His kingdom and so on] as being in that generation and before some who were then alive should taste of death, there is no need of understanding Him of His coming to the last judgment. But it may well be understood of His coming at the destruction of Jerusalem which has been shown He calls by these names,” etcetera. Here’s his last paragraph. I’ll read it in its entirety.

It is evident that He, Christ, did not suppose His coming to the last judgment and the consummation of all things would be till a long time after the destruction of Jerusalem. The calling of the Gentiles instead of the Jews is spoken of as what should be principally after the destruction of Jerusalem Matthew 21:41–43, Luke 20:15–16, Matthew 22:7–10. But this Christ Himself speaks of as a gradual work in the parables of the grain of mus-tard seed and the leaven hid in the three measures of meal, Matthew 13:31–33, Luke 13:19–21, Mark 4:26–32. And it’s very manifest that Christ did not suppose the consummation of all things to take place till long after the destruction of Jerusalem, Luke 21:24, where it is said of the Jews that they should be led away captive into all nations and Jerusalem should be trodden down of the Gentiles till the times of the Gentiles should be ful-filled.

I think you hearers must realize that this is a fair sample, and I think it is a full sample. But it’s a fair sample of the way in which Jonathan Edwards proceeded with problems of biblical criticism. There was never any reading them out of court. There was never any falsifying of them. There was never any damning of the person who raised the objections as a square confrontation with them, a masterful knowledge of the Bible brought to bear upon them, and a thorough concentration on the issues at stake without any irrelevant bylines or any dragging of red herrings across trails or anything like that. I think any biblical critic of opposite persuasion could not read this statement without being profoundly impressed by it, and in my opinion, quite incapable of answering it. But I’ll leave that to your opinion as we close this lecture on Jonathan Edwards and the Scripture.

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