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Edwards for us: The holiness of beauty and the beauty of holiness

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.

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A stroll in Northampton: Remembering Jonathan Edwards

On October 5, Jonathan Edwards turns 300. From my vantage point in Northampton, where he preached the Great Awakening and served as pastor for 23 turbulent years, it is tempting to imagine bringing him back in a time machine. But how to translate this man of God, who balked at the liberalizing Half-Way Covenant of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, to a town that is now “open and affirming” at every turn? What nerve tonic could I give Edwards to steel him for the shock of discovering that a Polish National Catholic church sits on his homestead?

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America's theologian

Only one portrait of Jonathan Edwards was painted during his lifetime, a rather conventional “likeness” done by the Boston-based painter Joseph Badger. The face is severe, aloof, unsmiling and suspiciously similar to many of the other faces in Badger’s 150 or so portraits from the 1740s and ’50s. It turned out to be too severe for many of Edwards’s admirers over the years.

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