1232. INFINITE EVIL OF SIN. SATISFACTION OF CHRIST. EQUIVALENCE OF HIS SUFFERINGS

to sinners’ eternal punishment. Besides the dignity of Christ’s sufferings directly arising from the dignity of his person, “there is another consideration, by which the value of our Savior’s sufferings ought to be estimated. As an indignity is always rated by the presumption, and as the presumption bears an exact proportion to the meanness of the person insulting, and to the greatness of the party insulted; so, in like manner, all acts of condescension being estimated by the humility, and that, again, by the dignity, of the condescending person, and by the lowness and demerit of the party condescended to.” Deism Revealed, vol. 1, pp. 252–53.

This week is going to be a bit different from previous Miscellany Mondays entries. The focus here is not the actual content of the miscellany, but rather what this miscellany is indicative of. I was recently asked what I thought folks like Jonathan Edwards, earlier Puritans, even the American founding fathers would think about blogs, online social networking, and other similar tools entrenched in our culture. It’s a very interesting question and one that I’ve been thinking about for a few days now.

“Flame blogs” have certainly been around for a long time, as seen in the tract and pamphlet wars, especially during the various Protestant Reformations and in eighteenth century America, both in religious and political arenas. Social networking is a bit trickier to answer. I imagine many might have Facebook pages, but it’s hard to imagine our rather garrulous forefathers catching on to Twitter. I’m not sure any of them could have said or written anything in 140 characters or less. Perhaps the lone exception would be Benjamin Franklin, that master of apothegm. I don’t use Twitter, but I would likely sign up in order to follow Ben’s tweets.

I believe general blogging, however, would be a rousing success, which brings us to the miscellany entry for today. The majority of the entry is simply a quote from Philip Skelton’s Deism Revealed.¹ There are many entries like this, giving us glimpses into the things Edwards was reading, learning from, using in his own works, etc. Things that Edwards intended to share with others through his own writing projects and ministry work. There is a sense, then, in which Jonathan Edwards’s entire miscellany project was a sort of proto-blogging. More than a diary or a journal, his miscellanies notebooks served as the one place he could jot down thoughts, aggregate research, try out ideas, even construct the basic flow and argumentation of his greatest treatises. Not only do I think that Edwards would have been an avid blogger, but I believe he would have been a super-blogger! The miscellany notebooks were not the only notebooks he kept. He had a “controversies” notebook, his “notes on Scripture” notebook, three notebooks of research for his proposed History of the Work of Redemption, and several sermon notebooks. So it could even be likely that Edwards would have had multiple blogs had the technology been available to him in the mid 1700s.

There’s lots of things that can be said about this, but that would likely turn into a harangue, so I’ll point out just one. There are many different opinions on blogging, and certainly all opinions have some degree of reality behind them given the wide scope of blogs on the internet. Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of junk out there. But on the flip side, blogs can be incredibly powerful tools of communication and exchange of ideas, especially if the blog has a particular niche focus. I’ve noticed that many who are in the academy are starting blogs around their areas of interest, expertise, and research, furthering the credibility and impact that blogs can have on scholarly pursuits and inquiry. This isn’t to say that blogs should be quoted in term papers, journal articles, and dissertations, although there might be some cases where that is entirely appropriate, but blogs can be a beneficial accessory to scholarly conferences and seminars in fostering the same types of discussions and sharing that goes on in those events.

So while it’s hard to say if there would be a wholesale endorsement by those who have gone before us of the technological communication media available to us today, moderately used, of course, in the case of Jonathan Edwards, blogging appears to have the best case for being used by Edwards and those of his time. Especially so when we recognize that Edwards and his contemporaries were already doing something very much like blogging, just without the public publishing capabilities we have today. Hopefully the use of blogs in the academy will continue to grow, carrying on the legacy of Edwards and his miscellanies, and adding better openness to current projects and pursuits in the many scholarly disciplines.

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miscellany mondays, the miscellanies