Preaching the History of Redemption Accomplishes It
A Study of Edwards’s and His History of the Work of Redemption
Introduction
Some works of the intellect fascinate as they simultaneously intimidate. Jonathan Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption (hereafter referred to as HWR) is just such a work. When I once asked a friend and close reader of Edwards to tell me something about this 30-sermon series, a work living somewhere on the horizon between a vast sermon and a treatise, the response was, “Well, it’s the whole thing, you know.” Which is true, in a way; it is an attempt to tell the whole history of redemption from beginning to end, as God sees it. So Edwards: “The work of Redemption is a work that God carries on from the fall of man to the end of the world”[i]. It is thus not surprising that another close reader of Edwards like Amy Plantinga Pauw could begin a talk on Edwards by stating, “Jonathan Edwards was a theologian of the grand narrative.”[ii]This very fact is what brings most readers of Edwards either to a state of profound respect or utter frustration. Grand narratives are not the kind of thing you take for light reading on the beach, and most of us today are suspicious of (and let’s confess, intimidated by) anyone who claims to tell “the whole story.”
Edwards himself is responsible (at least in part) for fascinating and intimidating. In his letter to the Princeton trustees, he famously remarked, “I have had on my mind and heart… a great work, which I call A History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of a history, considering how the affair of Christian theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ; which I suppose is to be the grand design of all God’s designs, and the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees; particularly considering all parts in the grand scheme in their historical order.” If this were not enough, his is a multi-tiered method, “carried on with regard to all three worlds, heaven, earth and hell: considering the connected, successive events and alterations, in each so far as the Scriptures give any light; introducing all parts of divinity in that order which is most scriptural and most natural: which is a method which appears to me the most beautiful and entertaining, wherein every divine doctrine, will appear to greatest advantage in the brightest light, in the most striking manner showing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole.”[iii]
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