Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and in this podcast, the Questions That Matter podcast, we pursue discipleship of the heart and mind in the legacy of C.S. Lewis.

And so I'm delighted that my conversation partner today, for this conversation, is philosopher, theologian, pastor, missionary, and college president Jonathan Edwards. Now, you're maybe thinking, “The Jonathan Edwards who lived back in the 1700s?” Yes, that Jonathan Edwards. So, obviously, he's not here in the studio with me or online. I'm going to be alone on this recording but telling you about Jonathan Edwards, because I just recently finished reading an excellent book about Jonathan Edwards by the great historian George Marsden.

The book is called [1:06 An Infinite Fountain of Life] An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century. And if you may remember, C.S. Lewis talked about the fact that he called himself a translator. He took these ideas that he read about by theologians and scholars and in the Bible and translated them for a secular audience in the 1940s in the UK. And so Jonathan Edwards needs a translator, and George Marsden, I believe, is the great translator of Jonathan Edwards. And so you may be thinking, “Well, so, do you have George Marsden to converse with?” Well, through his book, yes, but I was not able to connect with George Marsden in a way that this could work, and I think that's probably best. But George Marsden is an important voice for us in our world today, as is Jonathan Edwards.

So let me just do a little commercial about George Marsden. George Marsden is an American historian, has had a long history as a historian. He’s retired now. He’s 84 years old. He wrote a very thick book about the history of American academics, the American university; The Soul of the American University, I believe is the title. And in the last chapter, or maybe it was even an appendix, he titled it, “The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.” And that chapter got so much attention that they ended up publishing it as a separate book, a very thin book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. And I believe that book has been used by God to spark a… I wouldn't quite say a revival, but maybe a renaissance of Christian scholarship. And when I was in faculty ministry, we quoted that book. We gave it to Christian professors to encourage them that, yes, there is a way to do scholarship as a Christian that is distinct from a secular worldview or secular assumptions, and it energized graduate students and professors to keep pursuing scholarship. So if you know someone who is an aspiring academic or they’re in graduate school now or they're even considering it, George Marsden’s very helpful, thin book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, could be a great Christmas present for them or birthday present or for no reason at all present.

But I want to talk about Jonathan Edwards, because he is so very important, I think, in the way American Christianity has developed. And George Marsden makes a very good point in this book that there are some relevances for the twenty-first century that are really crucial. But here's the thing: Jonathan Edwards is very, very difficult to read. And so a lot of people are just not aware of his ideas, and they're really important ideas. So there are a number of publications that try to make Jonathan Edwards readable, intelligible, for mere mortals like me, and perhaps most of you.

So one of Jonathan Edwards' most important books is his book on The Religious Affections. And one of the founders of the C.S. Lewis Institute, James Houston, actually wrote an annotated version of The Religious Affections, and I found that to be very readable and very accessible. I don't think it's in print anymore, but you can find used copies of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections with notes by James Houston, and I would recommend that. I'm also going to put in the show notes a series of five short little books that are excerpts from Jonathan Edwards, put together by a team of scholars actually, that I think does a very helpful job of helping us grasp some of the core things of Edwards. And then, if you do want to really dig in some more, the next place I would recommend are some of Edwards’ sermons. Those are some of the more accessible writings of his, and there are collections of sermons, and each one's maybe 15 or 20 pages. Those would be very good places to go.

I still remember being mesmerized by his sermon, “Jesus The Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever.” [5:50 “Jesus The Same Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow,” or “The Same Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. You see how mesmerized I was taken by that?]

So let me just share a few things about Edwards’ life. And by the way, also in the show notes, I'm going to say George Marsden wrote an amazingly thorough, over 600 page biography of Jonathan Edwards that just gives you a full picture of the world he faced, the world in which he lived. Then people said, “This is really great, but 600 pages is not going to be attempted by most people,” so he wrote a shorter biography of less than 200 pages. I think it's about 160 pages. And then this most recent book, [An Infinite Fountain of Life 6:33] An Infinite Fountain of Light is 140 pages. And by the way, I'm so encouraged that a man of 84 years old is still writing. Way to go, George!

So here's just a nugget from Jonathan Edwards that is so very important. And he tells this in several places, and he gets quoted about this by many, many people. There's a world of difference between knowing that honey is sweet and the experience of tasting honey, and we need both. But Edwards lived at a time in a culture where there were a lot of people who knew some of the right answers about the Bible, but they weren't born again. They hadn't been grabbed by the sweetness and the beauty of knowing God in a personal, loving way. And so he preached for true conversion, and he preached for recognizing the difference between false conversion or a false Christianity that knew some of the right answers but hadn't embraced and been changed by the gospel.

And he makes a point that we're a little gun shy to make in our world today, but his point is that, if someone truly is born again, they should be changed, not just on the level of behavior, but on the level of their affections. And by that term, he means something deeper than just emotions. It should well up in us a sense of gratitude and joy when we hear about the love of God and that knowing God is sweet, the way tasting honey is sweet.

So that can get lost because he is so very philosophical and very deep in his writing. Marsden quotes, in full, a lengthy sermon at the end, the appendix of his book, of Edwards’ famous sermon, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” and it's a very philosophical sermon and a difficult one to understand, and so we just ignore it. But Marsden does a very good job for us of pointing out that what Edwards had in mind when he said “light” was he meant love, a divine and supernatural love. And he spoke about it as deep in the marrow, if I can use that illustration, in the marrow of the existence of the world. Our world has, at its core, the love of God.

And so no wonder Paul prayed in Ephesians 3 that we would be able to grasp it and that we would need the power of God to be able to grasp the love of God. So Edwards has an important point to teach us about the love of God. Here's how Marsden concludes his book, at the end of 140 pages: “When Edwards speaks of an infinite fountain of life, then, he is pointing toward the infinite beauty of the love of God at the heart of reality. We might think of it as an infinite fountain of love.” And so he says, “We humans are so often preoccupied with our passions and lesser loves close at hand, we fail to recognize the beauty of God's transforming love. Our natural instincts are to remain as comfortably content in the dank darkness as mushrooms, and yet we have the potential to become exquisitely wonderful flowers nourished by the sun.”

Have you thought about your spiritual legacy? If you were to die tonight, would you leave behind a clear message to your family, friends, and the whole world about your faith in Christ? Your love for them? Your hope for them? If not, what do you need to do to prepare for your leaving this earth? We have a resource on our website with answers and guidance in a new video by Joel Woodruff, our president of the C.S. Lewis Institute. And I think it's really helpful, and it gives guidance and insight about how to think through these issues and then how to prepare for them. And there's an informative, easy-to-understand format laced with I think some really good stories. So check it out at our website, under Spiritual Legacy. Or if you like, cslewisinstitute.org/spiritual-legacy.

It's got a feel of C.S. Lewis, doesn't it? Earlier in the book, Marsden quotes a letter that Jonathan Edwards wrote to a woman who was going through terrible pain and grief of the loss of loved ones. And this was a letter that he wrote, never expecting that anybody would see this other than that one person to whom he wrote. And yet, listen to the poetic way he expresses, and he was trying to point the woman to see her grief in light of the suffering of Jesus. Again, this is a private letter, but he wrote, “He [talking about Jesus] suffered that we might be delivered. His soul was exceedingly sorrowful unto death to take away the sting of sorrow and that we might have everlasting consolation. He was oppressed and afflicted that we might be supported. He was overwhelmed in the darkness of death and hell that we might have the light of life. He was cast into the furnace of God's wrath that we might swim in the rivers of pleasure. His heart was overwhelmed in a flood of sorrow and anguish that our hearts might be filled and overwhelmed with a flood of eternal joy.”

We need our affections stirred, and Jonathan Edwards can help us, and George Marsden as a translator for Jonathan Edwards can help us tremendously. So I want to recommend that you try to get a hold of some of Edwards’ sermons, that you take a look at George Marsden’s writings.

Listen to how Marsden starts his book: “Christians in every era need to pursue once in a while to get their bearings. Though we belong to churches that give us some good guidance, that advice must compete with bewildering numbers of other voices we hear during the week. It is as though we are hiking in a land only half familiar to us, and we are confronted with many unmarked, poorly marked, or increasingly wrongly marked turns.” And so by getting a voice from history, from a different culture, looking at his present culture, we can say, “Oh, maybe I need to step back and look.” Again, C.S. Lewis said these kinds of things many times.

Play with that image, will you? Not now, while listening to this podcast? But what does that mean if, at the very core of the existence of the universe, is the love of God. Part of what that means, part of what that means… we need to be willing to say that, without that, our world is quite despairing and quite empty and really hopeless. Part of evangelism, or pre-evangelism, in our day and age, is to be willing to say, “Without God, without purpose, meaning, design, our world is pretty empty, and life is pretty empty.” Francis Schaeffer used to talk about dialoguing with people to bring them to the point of despair, and we need to do this with kindness and gentleness. Schaeffer on many occasions said we need to do this with tears. I think some of us like, delight, to bring people to a point of despair out of a meanness or a harshness or a gotcha kind of thing. But we need to say with compassion to people in our world, “Without God, without salvation, without the love of God expressed in its most powerful display of Jesus' death on the cross, it’s hard to find things to grasp and to grab onto.”

Quite a few years ago, I watched a debate. It was taking place in New York City. It was between Tim Keller, the pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and a man who at the time was serving—and I think he still does serve—as the secular chaplain at Harvard University. I'll try to find a link to it. No, I probably won't try to find a link to it because I've looked for it before, and I haven't been able to find it. But in this dialogue, they were trying to answer the question, is there an ultimate big explanation of meaning in life? Can people find meaning in life? And is there an ultimate meaning in life? And so Keller argued yes to the two questions. First, yes, there is ultimate meaning in life, and secondly, because of that, people can find individual meaning in life. The secular chaplain—play with that by the way, secular chaplain. He's an atheist. But Harvard University thought, “We have so many students who are atheists and agnostic and secular that we need, in addition to the campus rabbi and the campus Christian minister and the Catholic priest and the Buddhist leader, we need a secular chaplain,” so they hired this man to be a secular chaplain. And ultimately, his answers to those questions is no, there is no larger purpose in meaning and life, but to the second question, yes, people can find individual meaning in life.

And at one point, Keller, so very, very gently and kindly said, “So the Christian answers those two questions with yes and yes. Yes, there is ultimate meaning in life. It's found in God. It's found in a personal relationship with God. It is purchased for us by Jesus's death on the cross. We can access it by faith in what Jesus did on the cross. So yes, there is ultimate meaning in life. And then secondly, yes, people can find individual meaning in life.” And then he said, “But the alternative, the secular alternative is no, there is no ultimate meaning in life, but yes, people can find… they can manufacture meaning in life by finding a cause to be dedicated to or a relationship to pour into or their family.” And so what Keller then said was, “I've seen this in a lot of people in my time in New York, and over time, it becomes a very, very much bigger no and a very, very smaller yes.”

The answer to the question of, “Is there any meaning in life?” If the answer is no, that starts looming large. And we start seeing that, “Oh, no! It’s really hopeless,” and our finding or manufacturing or creating individual purpose and meaning in life, that yes becomes smaller and smaller. It's an ever increasing no and an ever decreasing yes.

And part of learning things from Jonathan Edwards, learning things from Tim Keller, learning things from C.S. Lewis, is the willingness to look at that and to gently say, “Maybe we need to reconsider some of this.”

By the way, I was struck by this not too long ago. Maybe I've shared this on other podcasts. I quote it in my book, Mere Evangelism, because I was just so struck by it. It's from an op-ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal from several years ago, written by a psychologist, a therapist, a woman who does not seem to indicate that she's particularly religious, but this article dug in this way. She says, “As a therapist, I am often asked to explain why depression and anxiety are so common among children and adolescents. One of the main important explanations—and perhaps the most neglected—is declining interest in religion.” She then goes on to document that, in fact, in America, religion is declining. And then she talks about these effects on children, and she's quoting a lot of research, and this is documented experiment. Then she says, “Nihilism,” that belief that there is nothing, there's no purpose, there's no meaning. “Nihilism is fertilizer for anxiety and depression and being ‘realistic’ is overrated.” Do you hear what she's saying? And then she says, “I am often asked by parents, ‘How do I talk to my child about death if I don't believe in God or heaven?’ My answer is always the same. ‘Lie.’” She says you said lie to your children. “The idea,” she says, “that you simply die and turn into dust may work for some adults, but it doesn't help children.” The title of her article was, “Don’t Believe in God? Lie to Your Children.”

Well, I hope you're horrified by that. We can do a whole lot better. We can tell people the truth. We can say, “If there is no God, if there is no purpose, if there is no afterlife, if, dare I say, John Lennon was right in his very popular song, ‘Imagine’—‘Imagine there's no heaven above us, only sky,’ that doesn't lead us to think that life is beautiful. That leads us to think that life is absurd.” And some people cover over that with absurd humor or covering it over with drink and drug and distraction. And then some have to feel this need to lie to their children because they don't want their children to be depressed and anxious. But some of us can say, “There is a God. He’s a good God. He’s a loving God. In fact, the longings that we have within us are to connect to His love and to experience it on a deep, deep level, not just intellectually to answer our intellectual questions, but to find satisfaction and hope and joy in the midst of pain and difficulty and a world that seems to make less and less sense.”

So, all that is…. Thank you very much for my guest, Jonathan Edwards. Thank you very, very much for my guest, George Marsden. Even though they weren't here in person, they were here through their writings, and I recommend taking your toe and dipping it into the shallow end of Jonathan Edwards and see how far God will bring you to benefit from reading and hearing from him. As I said, I'll put some links in the show notes, and I'll also link to some other resources on our website. George Marsden wrote an article for us a number of years ago. I'll link to his article. It came after he wrote a biography of the book Mere Christianity. Can you imagine that? Princeton University Press wanted to do a series of biographies of influential books, and one of them was Mere Christianity, and George Marsden got to write about it, and it's a great study, not just how that book came to be, but how God has used it. And so may God bless you as you walk with Him, as you grow in Him. We pray and hope that our resources help you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman