The Homiletical Skill of Jonathan Edwards

By John D. Hannah

[John D. Hannah is Chairman and Distinguished Professor of Historical Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.]

Abarren rationalism—mind without heart—plagues much of the church today. And heart without mind is just as tragic, leading to a rootless professionalism. Jonathan Edwards, eighteenth-century American Puritan, balanced these two elements of the inner man in a remarkable way. This preacher-theologian-philosopher took learning about God as seriously as loving and obeying Him. In his preaching Edwards joined his deep passion for the knowledge of God with his sincere love for God.

Preaching, Edwards said, must be concerned not only with the content of the message but also with the audience to whom the message is presented. To him, preaching is the act of conveying the Word of God to others in such a way that the hearers eagerly embrace and live out the truth.

Edwards’s Emphases in His Preaching

Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut. His father Timothy was a prominent pastor in the Connecticut River Valley. Though brought up in a pious home, Jonathan was not converted until after he began his graduate work at Yale University. As he walked through a meadow near his home, contemplating the implications of God’s sovereignty and the affirmations in 1 Timothy 1:17 that “the only God” is “King eternal, immortal, [and] invisible,” he experienced what he described as an “inward, sweet delight in God and divine things,” “a sense of the glory of the divine being, a new sense,” and “a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God.”[1]

Edwards described the essence of his conversion as delighting in the holiness of God and the doctrines of the gospel. He wrote, “The holiness of God has always appeared to me the most lovely of all His attributes. The doctrines of God’s absolute sovereignty, and free grace, in showing mercy to whom he would show mercy; and man’s absolute dependence on the operation of God’s Holy Spirit, have very much appeared to me as sweet and glorious doctrines.”[2]

Having trained for the ministry, Edwards made preaching his lifework. “Edwards was first and foremost a preacher and pastor leading souls to the truth as he saw it and interpreting the religious experiences of his listeners. His primary tool in achieving these goals was the sermon, the spoken word of God, which in the Reformed tradition that shaped him was the centerpiece of worship and religious edification.”[3]

Edwards took the task of preaching seriously, believing that the delivered sermon was the oral vehicle of the written Word of God. Accounts of his preaching give the distinct impression that his talents were more literary than oratorical. The object of his thoughts—Christ in all His beauty—and his earnest desire to use all his abilities to make Him known were the key to his effectiveness. The substance of his preaching was the Bible, the object of his preaching was Christ and redemption through Him, and the audience was his parishioners in Northampton and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As John Smith has noted, Edwards’s “weak points appear to have been in voice, gesture and rhythm; his power was in his masterful use of language.”[4] Kimnach notes, “After theology, Edwards thought most about expression: what is language, how it operates on the mind, and how its resources might be variously exploited.”[5] Though his technique may not have matched the brilliance of his mind, he gave considerable attention to the task of preaching. He preached twice on Sundays, once on Thursdays, and on special or occasional events in the life of the community. He produced a body of sermonic material that is staggering in quantity. He wrote more than twelve hundred lengthy sermons and several books derived from sermonic series.

Edwards seems to have been more interested in persuasion than mere expression, for the bulk of his writing is polemic. He relentlessly endeavored to prove his points, but by employing various rhetorical devices coupled with his own personal passion for the things he preached, he also sought to avoid wearying the audience. In comparing the structure of an Edwardean sermon with that of his father or grandfather, it is evident that he simplified them by eliminating complex subheadings. Edwards seems to have been a student of his audience as well as His God. He did not compromise his knowledge of God in order to keep his audience, but he sought to be aware of how his audience responded to oral communication.

Though Edwards presented argument after argument to sustain his points, he did not believe that rational explanations or carefully crafted sermons possessed the power in themselves to convince anyone. He felt that that was the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God. He wrote, “The light of reason convinces the world that it is so: the Word of God puts it past doubt.”[6] Reason can demonstrate that something is true, but only the Spirit of God can create an affectionate desire or delight in it.

Edwards understood that communication is successful only when the idea in the communicator’s mind is conveyed to the audience with interest and energy. Preaching was not merely an exercise of rhetorical art, though communication skill is essential for conveying the meaning of concepts. The heart of Edwards’s preaching had to do with his ability to involve his audience in a serious fashion in what he wanted to communicate to them. Preaching is effective when the hearers welcome and personalize what is communicated and act on it in a serious manner. Thus the task of the preacher is twofold: to explain biblical content and to encourage interaction with that content by the listeners. God acts through the words of the preacher of His Word, the Bible.

A great and powerful preaching performance (or written sermon) does not, of itself, engender conversion, though it may be so good as to become a “fit” vehicle for the transmission of saving grace. God supplies the Words immediately through the Scripture and the preaching; he has also provided each person with a faculty of understanding and a sense of the heart. It is the task of the preacher to fill the understanding by clearly expounding the Scripture and to “stir up” the heart by introducing the ideas of self into the context of the Word…. If the logic and rhetoric of the preacher are effective, and if the auditor is attentive and earnest, it is fitting that God give his Spirit simultaneously to the words, thus making them His Word, and to the heart of the auditor, causing a gracious infusion of faith. But God’s acts are never commanded or conditioned by either preacher or auditors, and the most brilliantly apt sermon may leave the most earnest auditor sitting cold and hopeless, though intellectually informed.[7]

Edwards believed that his sermons were more effective as communication if they were manuscripted. By carefully crafting his words, Edwards created vivid and personal images in the minds of his hearers. One has only to think of his best known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The image of the spider dangling over a pit, held by a thin thread, or of the taut bow of the warrior are stark figures in that sermon. Imagery, fused with abstract concepts, touches the minds of hearers. Literary devices such as metaphors, repetitions, or illusions cause the minds of the auditors to participate actively in the discourse in a reflective manner.

Scriptural allusions, stories, and life-related illustrations fill Edwards’s sermons. He incorporated extensive material in his sermons from several carefully compiled notebooks, one of which was a notebook of illustrations. For example in describing the impossibility of a sinner coming to Christ on his own and the miracle of divine light entering the soul, Edwards frequently used two illustrations. He said it is like asking a blind person to describe colors or like holding a jar of honey before a blind person and asking him or her to describe it. Just as a blind person can describe honey only by tasting it, so an unregenerate person can comprehend conversion only by experiencing it. True religion, he emphasized, must be experienced to be understood.

In the early days of his preaching Edwards read the manuals of John Edwards and Cotton Mather, as well as The Art of Puritan Prophesying, by William Perkins. From them he learned that preaching must be affectionate and impassioned. This led him to the conclusion that sermonizing had to be based on a new psychological theory of the interrelatedness of the faculties of the soul. That is, Edwards found in the philosopher John Locke helpful hints that man is more than a rational being, or that only the mind determines action. Man is an emotional being; in fact it is at the level of the emotional or affectional that all decisions are made in life. In communication the preacher has two vehicles: reason or mind, and feelings or affection. To preach persuasively, Edwards insisted, the preacher must believe and feel intensely what he preaches, and then he must communicate his personal feelings with the message so that he preaches from experience.

Edwards believed that the primary sphere of religious experience, the affections, was hidden below the rational surface of the mind in a complexity of feelings and impulses. Entry into the affections was gained through moving the mind to reflection. Preachers work in the abstract medium of language, while artists may work in glass, stone, or clay. Passion does not determine truth or truthfulness, but without it truth is not communicated effectively.

Edwards believed that decisions are made in the realm of the affections, not in the realm of the mind or reason alone. The soul, one’s immaterial nature, is composed of intellect (mind), affections, and will. A person’s affections—likes and dislikes—are the criteria by which he or she judges the ideas presented to the mind. The affections determine what a person wills.[8] Information pressed on the mind is important because it is a safeguard to right thinking; however, knowledge alone does not change things (neither does passion if it solicits an action apart from knowledge). Knowledge is a means of reaching the heart or the affections. Edwards therefore relied on logic and rational exposition for what might be termed aesthetic effects in order to surface feelings or values. Rational and logical argument can present theological concepts, but a special work of God is needed in the heart to confirm that they are real.

Amazingly, although Edwards did not believe that the mind determines action, he invested much of his effort in the intellectual realm. This is because he firmly believed that the heart is moved to make decisions based on the information presented to it. The mind is the conduit to the heart. Edwards was neither an idealist nor an empiricist; he was neither a rationalist nor a sensationalist. Instead he sought to balance the two approaches together.

This accounts for Edwards’s unique position in the swirling currents of the Great Awakening and the widening gap of religious opinion in the 1740s over the validity of the Awakening as a movement of the Spirit of God. His view was that neither the rationalists nor the enthusiasts were correct. Rationalists neglected the affectional component of true religion, while the enthusiasts neglected the rational component in favor of visions and dreams. Edwards believed that some detractors sought to dismiss the Great Awakening as an evil because of the extremes of numerous uneducated itinerants, and others sought to defend it. Those who sought to do the work of God in “heat without light” were destructive, Edwards said, much like those who claimed “light without heat.” Edwards’s point is germane to the issue of preaching. “If God wills, the words of the preacher become God’s Word and the auditor’s heart is filled with a ‘divine light’ which permits an immediate recognition of the truth and reality of the Word.”[9] To experience the holy beauty of God without the control of God’s Word in one’s mind is to be an enthusiast and thus to suffer vain imaginings. But to possess only the facts of the Word of God without a sense of its true beauty is to stand condemned.

Edwards’s sermons, then, were rational treatises that sought to inform the mind of truth and move the heart to action. These are the two essential, inseparable ingredients of the preacher’s task.

Edwards’s Methods in His Preaching

Edwards’s sermons have three parts: text, doctrine, and application or improvements. The text portion is the smallest in length, usually a single verse of Scripture. Each of his sermons had one central idea that grew out of the single-verse text. For example the central idea of the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is Deuteronomy 32:35, “In due time their foot will slip.” All sermonic material—Scripture, theology, illustrative material, application—were employed to drive home the meaning of the text.

Almost all of his sermons are topical in nature. He wrote a commentary on only one book, Revelation, and he preached verse-by-verse through only one chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, which was published as “Charity and Its Fruits.” Over several months he preached through the course of human history, from Creation to the “Recreation,” with one verse as the text for the thirty-sermon series.

In preparation for his sermons he recorded his ideas in several large notebooks under the headings “The Mind,” “Miscellanies,” “Shadow of Divine Things,” “Notes on the Scriptures,” “Miscellaneous Observations on the Holy Scripture,” and others. In other notebooks he recorded outlines for his messages. Materials in the notebooks were cross-referenced, and he perused them to find material for his sermons.

In preparing a sermon Edwards often used portions from his previous sermons (Kimnach calls this “cannibalizing”).[10] In essence, then, previous sermons became a “notebook” of source material. Edwards often carried more than one sermon into the pulpit and read from portions of them. His sermons were written on both sides of sheets of paper about five-by-seven inches, stitched together with thread and placed in the fold of his Bible.

The common image of Edwards’s preaching style originates from Samuel Hopkins, his friend and first biographer. Hopkins wrote in 1765 that Edwards slavishly read his sermons, lifting his eyes occasionally to gaze on the bell rope that dangled in the rear of the sanctuary. With little vocal variety and hardly any gestures Edwards relied, Hopkins noted, on the power of his words to create effect. Though he did not memorize his sermons, as his father and grandfather did their sermons, Edwards seems to have been aware of his manuscripts but not a slave to them.

His preaching career includes three distinct periods of sermon-making. First was the period of apprenticeship (1722–1727). This included the eight months he served as pastor in a small Presbyterian church in New York City and held interim pastorates in Bolton and Glastonbury, Connecticut. This was also the time of his tutorship at Yale University. Sixty-five sermons from these six years are extant.

Second was the period of mastery (1727–1742). This was his most productive and fertile period of sermon-making. A total of 645 sermons from this period are in existence. Most of them were written out in full. However, the last 140 or so sermons include only outlines, suggesting that Edwards spoke more extemporaneously as his career matured.

Third was a period of reuse (1742–1758). In this period Edwards preached little new material; he generally rearranged material he had already preached. From this time 510 sermons are extant, and most of them are in outline form.

Of the twelve hundred or so extant sermons (about 80 percent of the total) at least four hundred are marked as having been preached again, at least in part, up to three times. In some cases a single sermon was preached as many as five, six, or seven times. The greatest number of “repreached” sermons were delivered in his Stockbridge years (1751–1757), and most of them are in outline form. He may have had little time to prepare new sermons in the 1750s because he was occupied then with writing several works—Original Sin Defended; Discourse on the Freedom of the Will; The End for Which God Created the World; and True Virtue—and handling Indian affairs in a turbulent time.

Most of the sermons in his years at Northampton, Massachusetts, were preached in two parts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. However, when he preached elsewhere, he delivered them in one unit, summarizing or skipping some material.

Another unique feature in Edwards’s sermonizing was his treatment of topics. Some topics required more than one sermon. So he wrote the manuscript to whatever length was need to handle the material and then preached through the material, averaging about fifteen to twenty handwritten pages at a time. For example, if he handled the text and doctrine in one sermon, he would repeat the text and go on to the application in the next sermon. Sometimes either the doctrinal or applicational portion of the tripartite structure became a sermon or two in itself. In employing this method Edwards was able to convey the content that he wanted while being economical in his preparation time.[11]

Edwards’s Assumptions in His Preaching

The most fundamental concept behind Edwards’s preaching is the all-encompassing concept of the glory of God. Like all of life, the purpose of preaching, he stressed, is to bring glory to God. By the phrase “the glory of God” Edwards meant that believers are to be vehicles for the display of God’s attributes. Each believer, like a mirror, is to reflect the beauty of God. This is what Christ did. God is glorified, in Edwards’s view, not by a person’s activities, but by his or her character. Preaching, then, finds its ultimate reason in displaying God’s character. This is delineated by Edwards in The End for Which God Created the World[12] and is the foundation of his theory of ethics described in True Virtue.[13]

If the goal of everything a believer does, including preaching, is to reflect God’s character, the primary means of doing so is through the revelation of Christ, for He is the truest picture of God’s character. Edwards affirmed that the essence of the shepherding ministry of a pastor is to reveal to his people Christ, who is revealed in the Scriptures. In 1739 Edwards prepared a series of sermons known in their published form as A History of the Work of Redemption.[14] Using Scripture and extrabiblical history to explain the meaning of history past, present, and future, he emphasized that the focus of all history is the Incarnation, which he called “God’s greatest work.” He divided history into Redemption Promised, Redemption Purchased, and Redemption Applied. Wilson commented, “What deserves attention is his high and conventional Christology. In this he stood securely in the Calvinist tradition, and his Christocentric position is evident.”[15] And Edwards himself said, “Christ and his redemption are the great subject of the whole Bible.”[16]

Edwards was convinced that redemption was a work of God, that grace finds its origins in the discriminatory actions of God, and is wrought in the heart by the working of the Holy Spirit. The place where the salvation of the sinner is exercised is in the inner recesses of the person, the heart. It is not in the mind, though, as noted earlier, the mind is the vehicle to the heart. God works on the heart by means of the Spirit’s ministry through the Word of God. Hence preaching the Word is extremely important.

Edwards thought deeply about the message to be communicated and the audience to whom he was communicating. He discussed the relationship of understanding to will, that is, how people come to make decisions. While he differed from John Locke in important ways, he did follow him in that he rejected a “lineal sequencialism” that prioritized the rational faculty. To Edwards, the immaterial aspect of humanity is a complexity of mind and heart. As the mind provides information to the heart, knowledge is evaluated and actions are determined.

The freedom of the human will was central in his theory of preaching. Edwards believed that a person’s will was a choosing mechanism, not a creative mechanism. That is, the will chooses between available options presented to it; it does not create the option it chooses. His theory went something like this: The mind presents to the inner soul information that is evaluated, based on the soul’s notion of pleasure or delight or danger. The soul determines which choices to make. Unconverted people make choices according to their unredeemed nature, freely and truly. The redeemed also choose freely. The difference is one’s nature.

Unbelievers fail to come to Christ because they do not know Him in all His beauty. Having a hatred for Him because they sense that God is a God of righteous judgment, they fail to realize that He is also a God of love, mercy, and grace. Each unbeliever has a free will by which to make choices, but he or she does not have a proper object to choose. Preaching is the art of giving people a new object to choose. Thus an unsaved person’s problem is not a lack of freedom or inability to choose Christ; it is a natural aversion to Him because he or she has no concept of His perfect beauty.

Edwards rejected the traditional distinction between will and affections. Will is not a faculty in the mind; instead choices are made in the realm of affections. Information provided through the mind does not determine the choices a person makes; instead one’s love (affections) determine his or her choices. Without Christ, people make self-oriented choices, and those choices result in their destruction. Selfish choices destroy the self, while the embrace of Christ is the highest expression of self-interest. Once a person sees Christ in all His beauty, he or she chooses Christ from self-interest (and for the first time it is also to the person’s true benefit). Volition is not determined merely by knowledge; it is determined by the strongest inclination for self-advance.

Preaching, then, is presenting Christ as the object to be embraced by people. In conversion new abilities are not given. As Cherry has stated, “No new facilities are given, but the natural human powers are given exercises from a new foundation.”[17] In this regard Edwards believed that discussing whether grace is resistible or irresistible is “altogether perfect nonsense.”[18] When God reveals His Son, resistance is dispelled in a willing embrace. God becomes the believer’s highest love; humans cannot resist the highest object of their own fulfillment. The problem is that people’s notions of pleasure are selfish; they find their origins in the fallen self and its perverted, limited concept of pleasure. In one of his early sermons in New York he put this matter rather plainly. “We cannot plead impotency. We cannot plead that we are not able to take care of our souls, for we certainly can if we will. There never was a man yet that endeavored to take care for the salvation of his soul and found that he could not…. No, this will not do; let no man feed himself up with thoughts of making this excuse on the great day of accounts.”[19]

According to Edwards the essence of conversion is the implantation of the divine nature into the heart. Through preaching, God has willed to open eyes of the hearers to the beauty of the Savior. In the miracle of redemption the heart is infused with new qualities and desires, which are from the Holy Spirit. Or, according to Edwards, these qualities and desires are the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit indwells the believer in the form of His divine character, in what the apostle Paul called the fruit of the Spirit. The principal characteristics of the saint are love and joy.

Conclusion

The following four points summarize Jonathan Edwards’s view of preaching.

First, preaching is one of the primary means of glorifying God. “For God to glorify himself is to discover himself in his works, or to communicate himself in his works which is all one…. he loves to see himself, his own excellencies and glories, appearing in his works, loves to see himself communicated.”[20] Preaching is intimately related to God’s glory because it is rooted in the Bible, God’s Word to humankind. The glory of preaching is that its object is God Himself; it is a holy endeavor.

Second, preaching is difficult in that the medium of language is not equal to what the preacher is seeking to describe; finite language is inadequate to convey the infinite. “The things of Christianity are so spiritual, so refined, so high and abstracted, and so much above the things we ordinarily converse with.”[21]

Third, preaching is the vehicle through which the Redeemer’s work is made applicable to the hearer. Without hearing about Christ, how can a person choose Him? Faith comes through hearing and hearing comes through the proclamation of the Word of God. If the unseen, the transcendent, is what is permanent, then every effort preachers undertake to win perishing souls is of paramount importance. Preaching is that activity of revealing to people the most beautiful object in all the world, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fourth, preaching, the ultimate means of exalting Christ, requires enormous effort. The preacher must first know the Christ he preaches. He must have a knowledge of the Word of God, the substance of his preaching. And he must know the people to whom he preaches so that he can communicate effectively. He must understand how people process thoughts and how ideas, conveyed through words, are brought into the soul. Cultivating the art of communication must be a priority for the preacher. Placing the Word in the mind is the task of the preacher; it requires all the effort he can put forth to proclaim the message of the gospel and deliver it in such a manner that the hearers can understand.[22]

What, then, should preachers today do in light of Jonathan Edwards’s views on preaching? First, they must be committed to preaching the mind and will of God, proclaiming Christ and the redemption of the soul. Second, preachers must become students of both the art of speaking and how people most profitably receive the Word. Third, preachers must recognize that only God can give people eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart full of affection for Him. Preaching presents to the mind the infinite object of Christ, and if attended by the work of the Holy Spirit, it enlightens the eyes. According to Edwards the reason a person does not come to Christ is that either he or she has never been presented with the beauty of Christ or in that presentation God has willed to blind that person’s eyes lest he or she see and believe.

In 1750 Edwards preached his farewell sermon to his Northampton parishioners after more than twenty years among them. He summarized the endeavors of his pulpit ministry for those years in this way: “I have used my utmost endeavors to win you: I have sought out acceptable words, that if possible I might prevail upon you to forsake sin, turn to God, and accept of Christ as your Saviour and Lord. I have spent my strength very much in these things.”[23] Every preacher should so minister that he too can affirm the same steadfast commitment to the task of preaching Christ.

Notes

1. Jonathan Edwards, “A Treatise concerning Religious Affections,” ed. John E. Smith, vol. 2 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 100–101; Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts concerning the Revival,” in The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen, vol. 4 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 296–300; and Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” in Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Glaghorn, vol. 16 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 792–96.
2. Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” 793.
3. Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas H. Sweeney, eds., The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), x.
4. John E. Smith, Jonathan Edwards: Puritan, Preacher, Philosopher (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 139.
5. Jonathan Edwards, Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, vol. 10 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), xiii.
6. Jonathan Edwards, “The Importance of a Future State,” in ibid., 361.
7. Wilson H. Kimnach, “General Introduction to the Sermons: Jonathan Edwards’ Art of Prophesying,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, 203.
8. Edwards, “The Value of Salvation,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, 324.
9. Kimnach, “General Introduction to the Sermons: Jonathan Edwards’ Art of Prophesying,” 203.
10. Ibid., 159-63.
11. For example one sermon was actually six: Jonathan Edwards, “Christians a Chosen Generation,” in Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, ed. Mark Valeri, vol. 17 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 276–330.
12. Jonathan Edwards, “Dissertation I: The End for Which God Created the World,” in Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey, vol. 8 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 435, 437, 446, 481, 530–31.
13. Jonathan Edwards, “Dissertation II: True Virtue,” in ibid., 542-44, 558-59, 577, 596.
14. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. John F. Wilson, vol. 9 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
15. Ibid., 54.
16. Ibid., 289.
17. Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (New York: Doubleday, 1966; reprint, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 31.
18. Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies” a-500, ed. Thomas A. Schafer, vol. 13 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 170.
19. Edwards, “The Value of Salvation,” 330.
20. Edwards, “The Miscellanies,” a-500, 361–67 (no. 247).
21. Ibid., 249 (no. 83).
22. Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733, ed. Mark Valeri, vol. 17 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 416–17.
23. Jonathan Edwards, “A Farewell Sermon,” in The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, 231–32.