First, there is now a Facebook Fan Page for this site. So you can now keep up with what’s going on at aDaSL from your Facebook News Feed by becoming a fan. Also, feedback is always welcome, so if there is something Edwards related that you would like to know more about, please leave a comment here or post something on the aDaSL Fan Page wall!

Second, a while ago I mentioned a new series of books called The Essential Edwards Collection. Well, the kind folks at Moody Publishers have provided me with a set to review. I hope to begin this series of reviews shortly and review a book a week for the next five weeks. From the small amount of skimming I’ve done so far, this series looks to be quite valuable in making Edwards approachable to quite a wide variety of readers.

So be on the lookout for the start of that series and please become a Facebook fan! And, of course, I’m always looking for interesting Edwards-related tidbits around the web. If you find something, please let me know about it!

I want to send a hearty thanks to everyone who entered the contest. I hope to be having many more of these, so stay tuned!

Get your entries in and tell your friends!

This book is Edwards’s landmark work on the nature of true Christian experience and is a must-read for any who are interested in Christianity and the religious history of America. In addition to the text of Edwards’s treatise, this volume contains a wonderful introduction by the editor, John E. Smith, as well as several pieces of personal correspondence that shed further light on Edwards’s process in the composition of this great work.

Here is the publisher’s description of this volume and the official giveaway rules can be found after the description.

This volume contains Edwards’ most mature and persistent attempt to judge the validity of the religious development in eighteenth-century America known as the Great Awakening. In developing criteria for such judgment he attacked at the same time one of the fundamental questions facing all religion: how to distinguish genuine from spurious piety? The Awakening created much bitter controversy; on the one side stood the emotionalists and enthusiasts, and on the other the rationalists, for whom religion was essentially a matter of morality or good conduct and the acceptance of properly formulated doctrine. Edwards, with great analytical skill and enormous biblical learning, showed that both sides were in the wrong. He attacked both a “lifeless morality” as too pale as to be the essence of religion, and he rejected the excesses of a purely emotional religion more concerned for sensational effects than for the inner transformation of the self, which was, for him, the center of genuine Christianity.

Official Giveaway Rules:

1. There are two ways to enter the giveaway. (1) Fill out the form below with your name and email address. This method is limited to one entry per person and multiple entries will be discarded. (2) If you have a Twitter account, follow @aDaSLblog and post the following update: RT to win a copy of Religious Affections from @aDaSLblog. One entry per day. http://bit.ly/7rB9RR #aDaSLcontest. This method of entry is limited to one entry per person per day for the duration of the contest.

2. The giveaway will begin on Tuesday, January 5, 2010 and will close at 11:59PM EST, Tuesday, January 19, 2010.

3. One winner will be selected from all eligible entries, and that winner will be announced on this site and notified either by email or through their Twitter account. Upon selection, the winner agrees to send their mailing address to the provided email address, and the book will be shipped at aDaSL’s expense.

4. At the conclusion of the giveaway, all information gathered will be immediately and permanently erased.

5. Any questions concerning this event should be directed to info@adivineandsupernaturallight.com.

One thing to be looking forward to in the next couple of months will be the first contest/giveaway at A Divine and Supernatural Light. A fantastic prize awaits one lucky reader of this site, so be ready to participate! I have a contest idea in mind, but if you have any brilliant suggestions for a good contest that would be much appreciated! Feel free to email ideas to info@adivineandsupernaturallight.com or leave a comment in the comments section of this post.

So if you use Twitter, be sure to follow aDaSLblog so that you can keep up and learn more about Jonathan Edwards!

Another way you can subscribe to and follow this blog is by way of Facebook. There is a Facebook app called NetworkedBlogs that you can use to follow the blogs you normally read, and aDaSL has a profile there as well. New blog posts will appear in your home feed when they are posted.

If you use a different means of following your favorite blogs, you can always click on the orange RSS button in the sidebar to get the aDaSL feed and add it to your preferred reader.

You have options, people (or “tweeple,” as the case may be), so choose the one that works best for you!

If you’re wondering what the Conference on Faith and History is, it’s an organization dedicated to “exploring the relationship between Christian faith and history,” with the primary goal of “encourag[ing] excellence in the theory and practice of history from the perspective of historic Christianity.” This group hosts biennial conferences, the next taking place in October 2010 at George Fox University, and publishes a semiannual journal, Fides et Historia (Faith and History). CFH is a wonderful organization and is definitely worth checking out.

When I was trying to come up with a title for the site, I wanted something that best captured the whole of Jonathan Edwards’s life and ministry. Unfortunately, when most people today think of Edwards they would probably say that, according to the stated criteria, I should have named the site “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” One of the greatest tragedies in the American educational system today is the treatment of Edwards in high school English and college introductory literature courses. Typically, all students know of Edwards from these courses is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God presented as the archetypal milieu of 18th century New England. Even worse, as was the case in a friend’s experience, some classes do not even read Sinners in its entirety, instead reading only the infamous spider passage. The result is scores of students having an incredibly skewed view of Edwards and his theology, colonial American society, and colonial American literature.

A better choice than Sinners, perhaps, is A Divine and Supernatural Light which you can read in its entirety here. This sermon is a wonderful example of the theological themes and trends that characterized the first half of the 18th century in colonial New England, a society so enraptured in the ebbs and flows of evangelical awakenings. Famous in its own right, though not to the degree of Sinners, this sermon speaks about the beauty and sweetness of God in who he is and how he saves humans from his wrath. The “divine light” that Edwards speaks of is “immediately imparted to the soul by God,” and consists in “a true sense of the divine excellency of the things revealed in the Word of God, and a conviction of the truth and reality of them, thence arising.”

This “new sense of divine things,” as Edwards describes it elsewhere, is of utmost importance in his overall theological system. Just as one cannot fully know or comprehend the sweetness of honey without tasting it, neither could one fully know or understand the beauty, loveliness, holiness, majesty, etc. of God without the awakening of the soul that comes through the Holy Spirit’s imparting the divine and supernatural light to that soul. One could certainly have some sort of knowledge of God without this light, what Edwards called “speculative knowledge,” but that knowledge would be insufficient for producing the sort of saving relationship that Edwards so desired all to possess.

The ideas found in this sermon would continue to be expounded upon and used by Edwards throughout his life, finding their fullest treatment in Edwards’s magisterial A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Much more than Sinners, A Divine and Supernatural Light offers a glimpse into the truly pastoral and aesthetic side of Edwards’s thought and writings, the meticulous nature that characterized many of his greatest arguments, and a broader sense of what was going on and being discussed culturally at the time of its preaching and publication. If only high schools and introductory college courses would teach this sermon, rather than a horribly imbalanced version of Sinners!