Types In Nature: Jonathan Edwards On Typology

By Gerald R. McDermott

[Gerald R. McDermott is the Anglican Chair of Divinity, Samford University, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the third article in the four-part series “A Typological View of Reality,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 7–10, 2017. The ideas presented in these lectures have been adapted and expanded in Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).]

The great Anglican priest and poet George Herbert wrote about looking through a window,

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.[1]

Two centuries later the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of nature radiating the glory of God:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.[2]

Both of these British poets were Christians who saw the world in the way much of the Great Tradition has seen it—not just spotted here and there with signs, some near and some far, but as a sign in and of itself, with meaning from top to bottom. In other words, it’s not “turtles all the way down,” but wheels within wheels of glory, each layer and dimension full of words and images pointing up and out to the Creator and Redeemer.

I suggest that it is not only tradition that teaches this but also Scripture. Or, in what Heiko Oberman famously called Tradition I, this is the Great Tradition’s understanding of Scripture, which for most of the church until the Council of Trent meant simply the traditional (or orthodox) way of understanding Scripture.[3]

For example, this is the way the Great Tradition read the author of Job. “Ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?” (Job 12:7–9, ESV).

For in this, the beasts and birds and bushes and fish talk. They all say, “The Lord made me, and he is glorious!” Jesus suggested the same when he regularly pointed his hearers to the world of nature for confirmation of what he was teaching. “Take a look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither labor nor spin. Let me tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. If God clothes the grass of the field that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, don’t you think He will care for you, O you of little faith?” (Matt 6:28–30, author’s translation).

My pedestrian translation: “The world of nature is constantly talking, reinforcing what I (Jesus) am teaching you.” In his parables Jesus compared houses built on sand and houses built on rock when storms bring floods; trees that produce good fruit and trees that produce bad fruit; seeds that are thrown onto a path, rocky soil, thorny soil, and good soil; tiny seeds that produce huge bushes; the way a bit of leaven spreads throughout a lump of dough; and the way weeds and wheat grow together in a field. He granted that many people see nothing about God in any of these things of nature, but for those with eyes to see, there are “sermons in stones,” as Shakespeare put it, lessons about the kingdom of God.

For Paul, this ought to be obvious to a Christian. He seemed exasperated that the Corinthian Christians didn’t see from nature that there must be a resurrection of the body: “You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life [again] unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain” (1 Cor 15:36–37, ESV). Paul was saying that nature has been teaching us all along that out of death comes new life that is different from its first form.

James B. Jordan suggests reasons why all of nature is one giant type containing an infinite number of types: “God is infinite and man is finite. We simply cannot grasp God’s infinite tri-personality all at once. For this reason, God chose to reveal the infinity of His personality in the diversity of this world. Various things in the world reveal various things about God.”[4]

John Frame, a Protestant Reformed theologian, is not afraid to say that this world of nature is full of analogies to God.

Everything in creation bears some analogy to God. All the world has been made with God’s stamp on it, revealing Him. Creation is His temple, heaven His throne, earth His footstool. Thus Scripture finds analogies to God in every area of creation: inanimate objects (God the “rock of Israel,” Christ the “door of the sheep,” the Spirit as wind, breath, fire), plant life (God’s strength like the cedars of Lebanon, Christ the “bread of life”), animals (Christ the “Lion of Judah,” the “lamb of God”), human beings (God as king, landowner, lover; Christ as prophet, priest, king, servant, son, friend). . . . All this can be boiled down to a simple fact: The universe and everything in it symbolizes God.[5]

So all the world is full of types, and the whole world is one massive type. But the presence and meaning of the types are not visible to those who cannot see. Like the Pharisees who searched the Scriptures but missed its inner meaning (John 5:39), the world is full of people who fail to see the meaning of the world. They miss the riches that lie under every rock, the message behind every bush. The eyes of their hearts need to be healed, said Augustine.[6] But if they seek that healing and their eyes are opened, then the sound of the world around them, as Michael Polanyi suggested, changes from noise to music.[7]

A Sampling From A Master Typologist

Jonathan Edwards, a master typologist, thought extensively about the world of nature. He insisted that he was not merely inventing correspondences as an Origenist allegorist would. He would say that Scripture had taught him the grammar of the language sampled here.

His “reading” can be divided into three categories or realms of nature. We will move, with Edwards, from the world outside of us in the heavens and the atmosphere, to the world of living things among the flora and fauna, and then to the world of “us” and inside us—the human person.

First, nature out there. The sun is Edwards’s primary type in the heavens. Scripture makes clear that the sun is a type of Christ because it speaks of Jesus as the “sun of righteousness” and the “light of the world.” Besides, the sun withdrew its light at the crucifixion of Jesus, and his resurrection took place at the same time as the rising of the sun.[8]

If Scripture proves the sun is a type of the Messiah, what does it show us about Messiah?[9] Or, to trace Edwards’s typological method more closely, how does the sun illustrate what Scripture teaches about Messiah Jesus? The answer for Edwards is several-fold. That the sun never diminishes in light or heat throughout the ages shows the “all-sufficiency and everlastingness of God’s bounty and goodness.” Nature’s dependence on the sun (“vegetables growing and flourishing, looking green and pleasant”) shows our need for the Holy Spirit’s “effusions” in order to be spiritually healthy.[10]

But the sun is not perfect. If you view it “with glasses” (a rudimentary telescope), you see that it has spots. They show us that even the most excellent created things have imperfections. The sun’s absence, in times of clouds and rain and darkness, highlights those imperfections. Plants need those times of rain and relative darkness in order to take advantage of the times when the sun is bright and clear. This shows, according to Edwards, that the “rains of affliction” are necessary to prepare the soul for “the clear shining of the Sun of Righteousness.” If a person receives only comfort and light and is “not prepared by humiliation,” it makes “the heart worse.” Pride then grows in the soul as a disease and eventually destroys it.[11]

The rising and setting of the sun is full of types. Overall, it is a type of the death and resurrection of Messiah. As the sun rises and brings the world out of darkness into light and warmth, so Messiah at his rising brings the church with him to happiness, life, and glory. The sun’s setting is red and promises a fair day on the morrow because Messiah’s death was “with blood and dreadful sufferings” and brought us “a fair day.”[12]

The moon is a type of the church. Just as the moon forever changes, rising and falling, waxing and waning, moving from full splendor to total extinction, so too the church’s lot on earth is to rise and fall in outward prosperity, succeeding and suffering intermittently through time. The moon’s glory represents the prophets and apostles of the early church, and “possibly” that of “the Blessed Virgin Mary,” because their glory is a reflection of the glory of Christ just as the moon reflects the light of the sun.[13]

Edwards also reflected on the seasons as types. Spring is meant to make us think of an outpouring of the Spirit of God. Seeds sprout, even those sown in rocky ground. They look fair for a while, but then because of dry and shallow conditions their pretty flowers wither and come to nothing. So too for souls in times of the Spirit who talk excitedly about God but whose affections dry up after a while. This is the difference between birds and frogs in the spring, both of whom lift up their voices then. The birds are the saints whose songs delight God during times of revival, while the croaks of hypocrites bring him no pleasure.[14]

The blazing heat of summer that dries up pools of water and withers herbs and plants that shot up in the spring should remind us of trials and sufferings that kill the shallow affections of hypocrites. Just as “sound fruit” persists through this heat, so too does the faith of the truly regenerate.[15]

The fading of leaves, grass, flowers, and all their glory in winter is a sharp contrast to the unfading brightness of the heavens—which is the same in summer and winter, age after age. God means for us to be reminded of the great difference between “earthly glory, riches, and pleasures” that fade like the flower of the field and “the glory and happiness of heaven which fadeth not away.” This typology of the seasons, Edwards noted, is “agreeable to many representations in the Scriptures.”[16]

Second, Edwards turned to the world of flora and fauna. Flowers are innumerable, he wrote, and so few of them become ripe fruit. The same is true of the near-infinite number of seeds that are sown, so few of which sprout. It seems a great waste, unless we recognize that God created these as types of the disproportion between those who endure in the faith and those who do not. So few are saved of the many who hear the Word. We are reminded by flowers and seeds that many are called but few are chosen.[17]

The progress of fruit is a type of growth in Messiah. When fruit is young, it is very tender and “easily hurt” by frost or heat or vermin. So too for young converts who are easily led astray. They must grow in perfection all through the course of their lives, just as fruit requires a term of growth before it is ripe. Fruit taken too early is bitter and sour when green and becomes sweet and pure only after suffering heat and other pressures. Usually it becomes red or its juice starts to look like blood, just as the blood of Messiah “fitted” the fruit of the tree of life for us. Young believers must suffer afflictions and persecutions—“in a word, the cross of Christ”—if they are to become sweet with meekness and Christian love. If heat destroys some fruit, so too affliction accomplishes nothing for hypocrites. But when true believers are ripe they are ready to quit this life for heaven, just as ripe fruit is ready to quit its tree at the touch of the hand.[18]

The flowers that eventually become trees start with slender shoots. Notice, Edwards observed, that when they are young they are easily bent, representing the more pliable nature of children, and the necessity of reaching children with the gospel while they are still malleable. Just as with a tree, with age comes stiffness, until it is impossible to direct in another direction without destroying the tree.[19]

Trees more fully grown represent human beings and the church. Each starts with a tiny seed, barely visible. Each becomes either barren or fruitful. Each is known by its fruit. The church is signified by special trees—grape (vines), olive, palm, and apple.[20]

Finally, there is the world of animals. Edwards saw meaning in a number of classes of animals, and the following are only a few of the ones he mentioned. Birds, he wrote, represent the inhabitants of heaven. This is why they are generally more beautiful than beasts and fish, and why some have “gorgeous plumage.” This is also why they create music, “sweetly praising their Creator.”[21]

While it is not a pleasant music, the cockadoodling of the cock at dawn is a type of preachers of the gospel who wake up sinners out of their sleep. This is also represented by the special singing of birds in the spring, which we have already seen is a type of an outpouring of the Spirit of God.[22]

The British Anglican John Stott was a lifelong bird-watcher, or as he puts it, an “orni-theologian.” Stott liked to quote Martin Luther on birds, from Luther’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount:

[God] is making the birds our schoolmasters and teachers. It is a great and abiding disgrace to us that that in the Gospel a helpless sparrow should become a theologian and a preacher to the wisest of men. We have as many teachers and preachers as there are birds in the air. Their living example is an embarrassment to us[!][23]

Stott wrote in his marvelous book The Birds: Our Teachers that storks in their annual migrations are examples to us of repentance. The prophet Jeremiah tells us, “No one [in Judah] repents of his evil. . . . Yet even the stork in the heavens knows her times” (8:6–7). Jeremiah was referring to the nearly half a million white storks that migrate over the Middle East every spring and summer between southern Africa and northern Europe, flying some 8, 000 miles each way. They teach us to return to the God of Israel after we sin.[24] Other species of birds teach typical lessons, according to Stott: owls teach us to face both ways, to the past and the future; pigeons, gratitude; hummingbirds, work; eagles, freedom; larks, joy; and all birds in their breeding cycles, love.[25]

Fish, said Edwards, typify the inhabitants of hell. We know this, he wrote, because water is the place for the dead in Scripture. The Rephaim, whales, and sea monsters in the Bible represent devils and the wrath of God. Scripture portrays the miseries of death and God’s wrath as the sea, the deeps, floods, and billows.[26]

Edwards once preached about dogs as types insofar as they are quick to show gratitude to their masters.[27] His point was that we should be quicker to show gratitude to our heavenly Father. Elizabeth Haysom is a Christian dog-trainer at a prison in Virginia. In prison with a 90-year sentence, she is a dynamic Christian who inspires all who know her. Elizabeth has noticed an abundance of types in dogs that teach us about the kingdom of God. One of those types is the way they learn obedience.

When training a dog, we build the behavior slowly step by step. We don’t expect a dog to magically understand what “stay” means. We build a habit of a good stay. And a good stay is one that holds through distractions (people, food, toys, other animals), that holds through distance (being out of sight) and that holds through duration (several minutes). Even one that holds for different trainers, who have different meanings for the word.

Christians will make mistakes and fail, just like dogs. But just as we trainers don’t let a dog quit, so too we should not let our failures excuse us from training in godly habits and attitudes.

Every dog trainer knows that no behavior remains “clean”—properly performed—unless it is regularly maintained. Regular practice of all cues is essential for readiness. Regular practice builds the habits until they are nearly perfect.[28]

Finally, Edwards found types inside us. Deep inside us he found filth, and this too is a type. By this he meant the filth that is inside our bowels, the dung that represents our inner corruption and filthiness, typified by the self-glorifying pride that thinks God is lucky to have us. Edwards believed that the twisting and turning of our intestines stand for the wiliness and shiftiness of our hearts in their natural self-deception. The fact that this is hidden from the outer eye means that our inner corruptions are secret, known in their fullness only to God (and those with whom we live).[29]

The filth is not a recent development in us but goes all the way back to our condition at birth. There too we emerged in filth, signifying our inner pollution. We were naked, to represent our spiritual nakedness before God. We were crying, to show that sorrow fills much of our lives. We were born “backward” (perhaps most babies in Edwards’s day were delivered face down), with our backs facing God and heaven, and our faces to the earth and hell, to demonstrate “the natural state of our hearts.”[30]

The natural state of our physical life, dependent on every breath of air we inhale, is also a type. The Bible teaches this in Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones coming to life by the Lord’s breathing on them, and Jesus’s breathing on the apostles to impart to them the Holy Spirit in John 20. Just as our physical life depends on breath every moment, so too our spiritual life depends on the breath of the Spirit of God infilling us. Job said, “Our lives are but a breath” (7:7), like a blast of wind that blows past and does not return. So too, when the warm heat of our breathing goes out of us, cold death “suddenly” comes in to replace it. It is a comfort to believers that when they see the sudden cold come to a corpse, they can reassure themselves that they have the supernatural breath that will keep them warm forever.[31]

Lastly, among “us” we can see types in children and assemblies. Children gradually grow into adulthood, showing us by their gradual growth not only the gradual spiritual growth of every saint (no room for Christian perfection here!) but also the gradual perfecting of the church into knowledge, holiness, and blessedness.[32]

The great assemblies of the human community have much to teach us of the kingdom of God. Because they are the assemblies of natural men, they teach us of nature’s types. The solemnity of a prince’s coronation is a “shadow” of the procession we will see at the end of the world as the saints receive their crowns of glory. This is also a shadow of what happened at Christ’s ascension when he was crowned “in his person.”[33]

The solemnity of great criminal trials and executions of criminals is a type of the great solemnity that will pervade the final judgment. So too the joy we experience at weddings is a type of the joy the saints will taste at the great wedding supper of the Lamb.[34]

Beauty As The Ultimate Type

Including other thinkers and other kinds of typology in nature would give a more complete picture of the range of types in nature. We might talk about types in human intimacy that neuro-science is discovering. Or we could talk about the types in cosmic physics that are revealing how finely-tuned the cosmos is, thus illustrating the createdness of nature by an intelligent Mind. Or we could explore the nature of the human mind that remarkably produces moral codes the world over that resemble one another, thus demonstrating the imprint of divine law on the human mind, no matter the culture. Calvin, who wrote so much about the sensus divinitatis, would see this as a confirmation of what he preached and wrote.

But that would miss what is perhaps more interesting, and certainly more beautiful, about Edwards’s typology of nature. For it has to do with beauty itself. Deep within the structure of nature, he suggested, is beauty as a type of the divine beauty. This is not a major theme in the tradition, at least not as deeply structural as Edwards’s. And most theologians, including historians of theology, are unaware of how singular Edwards’s thinking on beauty was.

In 1992 Patrick Sherry published Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics, in which he argued that the three greatest names in the history of theological aesthetics are Augustine, von Balthasar, and Jonathan Edwards.[35] But of the three, he insisted, the one who made beauty most structurally central to his vision of God was Edwards. For Edwards beauty describes better than anything else who God is. Edwards claimed,

God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above [th]em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty. . . . This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of the Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of Good; without which God himself (if that were possible to be) would be an infinite evil.[36]

For Edwards, not only is beauty the innermost meaning of who God is, but it is also the key to all the types in nature, both “out there” and “in here.” Being and beauty are interconnected and perhaps interchangeable, and both are refractions of God’s beauty:

God is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty, from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom and through whom and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.[37]

What we see of beauty around us is a type of the divine beauty: “All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of the Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.”[38]

But what does Edwards mean by beauty, and how is it seen in nature? Beauty for Edwards is most essentially proportion or consent. It might be a simple proportion or agreement between two apples, or a complex proportion or harmony of a beautiful human face. These are simple and complex beauties. The latter is a harmony among things that are different and even jarring. It might contain partial irregularities or even ugly disagreement. But if those partial or ugly features are parts of a larger harmony, then the ugliness or disproportion is aufgeheben, lifted up into a higher harmony that is a complex beauty.

So while there is the symmetrical harmony of a French garden at Versailles, there is also the asymmetrical harmony of a Japanese garden or a jazz chord that sounds dissonant when played alone but fits well within a progression of chords.

In nature we can see this in a mountain range. When I am hiking on a mountain trail in Virginia, I look at other mountains around and see no particular pattern or harmony, just irregular shapes and seemingly random piles of rocks and trees. But when I look down from an airplane at these same mountains, I see a beautiful pattern called the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their long patterns of ridges snake this way and that but generally in the same direction and often nearly parallel to each other. The pattern is pleasing to the eye and seems to have been designed by an intelligent Designer. In every dimension of nature, from subatomic particles to distant galaxies, we see objects that are discordant when observed close-up, but in perfect harmony when seen from afar.

Edwards said the same pattern exists in that part of nature called human and moral relations. Morally it seems wrong to be selfish. But Adam Smith observed two hundred fifty years ago that when a person tries to make money by making and selling something out of self-interest, he learns that he must make it well to please his customer so that the customer will come back later to buy another. If he prices it too high, the customer will go to another maker. The smart artisan, then, will make a good product and keep the price within an affordable range. What seems ugly—self-interest—after a while takes on a certain attractiveness because society constrains this self-interest so that it serves the interests of others. That overall pattern has a certain beauty to it.

Now, I know, you will say that life is not so simple. That artisan could collude with other artisans and fix the price, keeping the product out of reach of all but the upper classes. Or a multinational corporation could buy up all the raw materials and producers and fix the prices similarly. But as Winston Churchill once said about democracy, the free market is the worst economic pattern for society except for all of its alternatives. And I would venture to say that a twenty-first-century Edwards would say the same, that in this fallen world with its imperfect market system in the West, despite all of these problems, which come ultimately from sin, there is a certain beauty when I can go to a store in Alabama to buy fresh coffee that was harvested on the other side of the world. I am satisfied, and the small farmer in Africa is able to support his family. This is a kind of harmony that joins interests not initially allied to produce a limited but genuine harmony. This is a type in the very natural realm called human society and its economics.

Now let’s say one of the middlemen in this global coffee chain decides to live at a lower standard of living because he is impressed that the Second Person of the Trinity decided to do the same. The result is that he is able to buy coffee beans from forty percent more African farmers than otherwise. Thus more poor farmers are able to have the self-respect of working to be able to support their families. This is a moral and spiritual beauty, Edwards would say, that is a type of the ultimate beauty, which is the mutual love and service among the three divine Persons. In this way the patterns in nonintelligent nature and human society that join discordant members to form a higher concordance point toward, and are types of, the ultimate harmonies of self-denying service and love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The ultimate picture of that inner-Trinitarian service and love is the culmination of redemption. I say culmination because for Edwards its history started in the Garden, not at the cross, and required the entire history of Israel and the redeemed repristination of that history in the whole life of Jesus, which according to Paul is what saves us (Rom 5:10). There we see the ultimate harmony, self-sacrificial love in the ugliest evil of all history, the murder of the Son of God. In this unspeakable evil and ultimate ugliness genuine beauty is forged by the mutual love of three Persons—the Father suffering the passion and death of his Son, the Holy Spirit feeling the pain of the Father and enabling the Son to endure the horrors, and Jesus himself taking on the physical tortures we deserve.

This is the culmination of the whole history of redemption that is prefigured or typed in all of nature. As Edwards, Newman, and others have pointed out, all of nature is full of life coming out of death, and so a figuring or typing of resurrection proceeding from death is found in nature. This is but one among the millions of other correspondences—types—in nature to the world of super-nature.

This is Edwards’s version of the analogy of being, as John C. Cunningham has put it. The spiritual beauties of God are communicated “ectypically” into created nature as forms of beauty.[39] The person who sees these beauties in nature, and their pointers to the divine beauty, sees what Edwards called “the beauty of holiness,” which is the epistemological key to reality. “He that sees the beauty of holiness sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which the world is empty, no better than nothing.”[40]

The person who sees the patterns of beauty in nature, even amidst what seems disharmony and ugliness, sees the ultimate antitype, which is the meaning of all reality. Elsewhere Edwards suggests that this then enables, or is the very sign of, union with the Creator of all reality. Hence ontology is connected to epistemology. To see the types of nature is to be one with the Creator of nature.

Notes

1. George Herbert, “The Elixir,” quoted in Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 68.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (1877), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44395.
3. Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 366–69.
4. James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), 22.
5. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987), 230; cited in Jordan, Through New Eyes, 23.
6. Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 88, 5; cited in Alister E. McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 197.
7. Michael Polanyi, “Science and Reality,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (1967), 191; cited in McGrath, The Open Secret, 184.
8. Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson and Mason Lowance Jr., vol. 11 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). This and the other citations in this lecture are from Edwards’s notebook “Images of Divine Things.” This and other volumes in the Yale edition will be cited as follows: WJE 11:120.
9. I replace “Christ” with Messiah from time to time for two reasons: because some of these materials are inspired by Edwards’s notebook “Types of the Messiah,” and because we need to be reminded of the Jewishness of Jesus that is often obscured by our use of the English transliteration (Christ) of the Greek translation (Christos) of the Hebrew (mashiach).
10. WJE 11:54.
11. WJE 11:125, 85.
12. WJE 11:64, 66, 81–82.
13. WJE 11:65–66.
14. WJE 11:105–6.
15. WJE 11:88.
16. WJE 11:96.
17. WJE 11:70.
18. WJE 11:115–16, 123, 93.
19. WJE 11:59.
20. WJE 11:57, 80–81, 89, 98.
21. WJE 11:84–85.
22. WJE 11:92–93.
23. Martin Luther (1521), The Sermon on the Mount, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, American Edition 21:197–98, quoted in John Stott, The Birds: Our Teachers: Biblical Lessons from a Lifelong Bird-Watcher, collector’s ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2011), 10.
24. Stott, The Birds, 18–19.
25. Ibid., 23–94.
26. WJE 11:84–85.
27. WJE 14:195.
28. Elizabeth Haysom, “Dog Notes,” notebook loaned to the author.
29. WJE 11:92, 94.
30. WJE 11:54, 57, 96.
31. WJE 11:55, 70–71, 100, 129.
32. WJE 11:61.
33. WJE 11:119.
34. Ibid.
35. Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
36. WJE 2:298.
37. WJE 8:551.
38. WJE 8:550.
39. John C. Cunningham, “Jonathan Edwards and the Trinitarian Shape of Beauty” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2015), 74.
40. WJE 2:274.