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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
Jonathan Edwards is known for his insistence on a ‘practical’ or ‘experimental’ religion that engages the human heart. At its core is a sense of God's excellence and loveliness or the beauty and splendour of divine things.
The savingly converted enjoy ‘gracious discoveries’ of ‘God, in some of his sweet and glorious attributes manifested in the Gospel, and shining forth in the face of Christ…In some the truth and certainty of the Gospel in general is the first joyful discovery they have…More frequently Christ…is made the object of the mind, in his all-sufficiency and willingness to save sinners.’ Recalling his own conversion, Edwards says:
The first instance that I remember…of that sort of inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading those words, 1 Tim. 1: 17. ‘Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever, Amen.’ As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before. Never any words of scripture seemed to me as these words did. I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to God in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.
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