In January and February, I’m teaching a class on Religious Affections for my church in Sunday School. As such, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the awakenings that Edwards and much of Colonial New England experienced in the mid-eighteenth century. Every time I read the Affections, I’m struck by the balance that Edwards achieves between the Old Light “rationalists” and the New Light “enthusiasts.”

In this miscellany entry, Edwards’s intent is to show that “enthusiasm” has been around as long as the church. There was excitement, and response to the proclamation of the Gospel, and perhaps much concern for the things of religion, but ultimately much of this would not amount to anything. The seeming movement of God’s Spirit through these people would prove to be, in Edwards’s words, “pretended.” If first century Judea was not immune to such “enthusiasm” at the preaching of such a saint of God as John the Baptist, Edwards is implying, then certainly it should be expected that there will be some excesses and false affections drafting the genuine work of God’s Spirit in the colonial awakenings.

Therefore, “enthusiasm” is no reason to discredit the awakenings outright, as the Old Lights would prefer. Rather, it is necessary to seek ways in which to separate the wheat and the chaff. In other words, to find what are “distinguishing marks of a work of the Spirit of God,” or what are “signs of truly gracious and holy affections.”

1058. ENTHUSIASM.
John the Baptist was a person greatly moved by the Spirit. He preached to the people in a very earnest manner, warning of their danger, calling upon ‘em to fly from the wrath to come with great pathos, manifesting his great engagedness not only in words but deeds: his incessant labor and great self-denial and great boldness in his work, fearing none, reproving great and small, whereby the people, seeing and hearing, were mightily moved. Christ therefore says concerning him, Matthew 11:7 and Luke 7:24, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” Which seems to imply that there is such a thing as men’s being mightily moved and actuated by something that is pretended to be the Spirit of God, but yet is vain and empty as the wind, exceeding unsteady, and soon comes to nothing, though violent; and that the persons that are the subjects of this emotion do show their great weakness in yielding to it, and being governed by [it]. Such there were, many of them, in the primitive ages of the Christian church. Christ denies John the Baptist to be such a one.

Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 20, The “Miscellanies:” 833-1152, ed. Amy Plantinga Pauw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 395.

Filed under:
great awakening, miscellany mondays, religious affections, the miscellanies