Jonathan Edwards Quotes

       Jonathan Edwards
       1703-1758
      
       Jonathan Edwards was a colonial American Congregational preacher, theologian, and missionary to Native Americans. Edwards "is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian."
      
       His work is very broad in scope, but he is often associated with his defense of Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage. His famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," is credited for starting the First Great Awakening. Edwards is widely known for his books Religious Affections and The Freedom of the Will. He died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after beginning the presidency at the College of New Jersey (later to be named Princeton University). Edwards is widely regarded as America's greatest theologian.

The weakness of human nature has always appeared in times of great revivals of religion, by a disposition to run into extremes, especially in these three things: enthusiasm, superstition, and intemperate zeal.     Topics: Apathy, Revival, Weakness We cannot believe that the church of God is already possessed of all that light which God intends to give it; nor that all Satan's lurking places have already been found out.     Topics: Church, Light Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts: the sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above seem to impart a quiet to the mind.     Topics: Contentment, Nature, Doubt Preach abroad.It is the cooping yourselves up in rooms that has dampened the work of God, which never was and never will be carried out to any purpose without going into the highways and hedges and compelling men and women to come in.     Topics: Evangelism We have no strict demonstration of anything, except mathematical truths, but by metaphysics. We can have no proof that is properly demonstrative, of any one position relating to the being and nature of God, his creation of the world, the dependence of all things on him, the nature of bodies and spirits, the nature of our own souls, or any of the great truths of morality and natural religion, but what is metaphysical.     Topics: Faith, Creation Family education and order are some of the chief means of grace; if these are duly maintained, all the means of grace are likely to prosper and become effectual.     Topics: Family Grace is but Glory begun, and Glory is but Grace perfected.     Topics: Grace In efficacious grace we are not merely passive, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest. But God does all, and we do all. God produces all, we act all. For that is what produces, viz. our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are in different respects, wholly passive and wholly active.     Topics: Grace As grace is first from God, so it is continually from him, as much as light is all day long from the sun, as well as at first dawn or at sun-rising.     Topics: Grace To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here.     Topics: Heaven Every saint in heaven is as a flower in the garden of God, and holy love is the fragrance and sweet odor that they all send forth, and with which they fill the bowers of that paradise above. Every soul there is as a note in some concert of delightful music, that sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together blend in the most rapturous strains in praising God and the Lamb forever.     Topics: Heaven, Music Resolved, never to do anything which I would be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.     Topics: Holiness