Jonathan Edwards' Resolutions

Week beginning 2 January 2005

We all have our heroes, and readers of this column, as well as hearers of my sermons, may have picked up that Jonathan Edwards is one of mine. Our heroes are people we look up to, people we admire, and want to emulate. The danger is that we idolise them and forget that they had their flaws just as we do. In matters of life and of faith, only one person passes the test of perfection, and He remains my ultimate hero.

But we need lesser heroes too, and every time I pick up a biography of Edwards, or dip into his writings, I am amazed at the capacity of a human life for ministry, for service and for intellectual prowess. And in the words of Lloyd-Jones, no-one is more relevant for present-day Christianity than Jonathan Edwards.

I hope that readers will realise that I am not talking here about triple jumpers, but about President Edwards of Princeton, whose ministry in the eighteenth century in Massachusetts and in New Jersey, with all the revival interest of the Great Awakening, makes him one of the last of the Puritans and one of the first modern evangelicals. I guess that his writings are the leisure of fewer and fewer modern day Christians; but perhaps that is reflected in the catastrophic shallowness of the modern day Church.

When he was twenty, Edwards sat down and wrote out seventy resolutions. Like many twenty-year olds, he was an idealist and not a little precocious; but little in his subsequent life gives evidence of his abandoning his early commitment to Calvinistic, federal theology. Once he received a 'new sense of things' (one of his favourite ways of describing his conversion), the effect was profound.

Not least was the fact that for Edwards, being a Christian was every bit as important as becoming one. Indeed, simplistic as it sounds, for Edwards the test of genuine conversion, of becoming a Christian, is that one lives as a genuine Christian, pursuing holiness and Christlikeness day by day. Testimonies are good; but the real test of Christianity is in a life, not in a story.

So, between late 1722 and August 1723, Edwards penned his resolutions. In this New Year, full as it is already with our broken resolutions, Edwards' resolutions are worth pondering. By the grace of God he pens, among others, the following intentions and aspirations:

Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure on the whole, without any consideration of the time, whether now or never so many myriads of ages hence, to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

Resolved, to be continually endeavouring to find some new contrivance to promote the forementioned things.

Resolved, never to do, be or suffer any thing, in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God.

Resolved never to lose one moment of time, but improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.

Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.

Resolved, to endeavour to my utmost to act as I can think I should do, if I had already seen the happiness of heaven, and hell torments.

Resolved, in narrations never to speak any thing but the pure and simple verity.

Resolved, to enquire every night, as I am going to be, wherein I have been negligent, what sin I have committed, and wherein I have denied myself; also at the end of every week, month and year.

Resolved, to ask myself at the end of every day, week, month and year, wherein I could possibly in any respect have done better.

O that God would help me to discern all the flaws and defects of my temper and conversation, and help me in the difficult work of amending them; and that he would fill me so full of Christianity, that the foundation of all these disagreeable irregularities may be destroyed, and the contrary beauties may follow.

Do these bear any resemblance to our resolutions for 2005, I wonder? Henry Rogers' essay on 'the genius and writings of Jonathan Edwards', published in the first volume of the Hickman edition of Edwards' works, expressed the view that Edwards was cold and sterile, too given to examining his emotions and not allowing them proper expression. But if that is true -- and I suspect not -- then it was simply because he knew that the essence of biblical Christianity is that one lives to please Christ in everything.

Too often our aspirations for the future are self-centered, egotistical and shallow. We could do with a vision of Edwards' God as we enter the year of our Lord, two thousand and five.