My 300-year-old mentor
By Chris Armstrong

 
In 1985, I was a 22-year-old, newly converted bookworm in a suburban Pentecostal church. I was struggling mightily with a thousand questions about my new faith. Three questions in particular occupied me more than the others:

First, I had spent much of the previous year basking in a sequence of Spirit-led encounters with the living God. I say "basking," but much of what I experienced that year was a sort of training process. I had never been very comfortable with feeling or expressing joy. But God seemed to be taking a holy crowbar and prying me out of my shell. He was teaching me, through Scripture and through the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions, about the emotional dimension of the Christian life.

Second, as a young adult convert, the struggle with old habits and attitudes was new and disturbing. Like the Paul of Romans 7, I was shaken by the force which with "this body of sin and death" still ruled my everyday life. I wondered about holiness: could believers really live a visibly transformed life? If so, how?

Third, as an undergraduate studying religion and the son of two educators who thought he might have some gifts for study, writing, and teaching, I was seeking vocational direction. What had God created me to do? How could I chart a course that would honor his purposes?

Then, in the course of my studies, I opened the Treatise on the Religious Affections by 18th-century pastor-theologian Jonathan Edwards. And as I read, it seemed Edwards was speaking directly to me in each of these three areas.

Edwards showed me a biblical basis for "Christian affections"—that is, the emotions, will, and mind, all wrapped up together and leaning forward toward God. Starting with 1 Peter 1:8: "Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory," then opening up one Scripture after another, Edwards dwelt wonderingly on what he called the "sweetness" and "beauty" of God's holiness. He made the startling claim that if we are not emotionally involved with God, on the analogy of a human love relationship, we are not truly engaged in the "business of religion."

Second, his Reformed view of human nature resonated with my own experience: surely I had been dead in my sins, and God had reached down with irresistible grace to reanimate me. And however halting my progress towards a Christlike life, it seemed to be as Edwards argued in Religious Affections: my baby steps in the sanctified life were the surest sign of his gracious work in me.

Finally, his use of his philosophical gifts, which he turned so effectively and so pastorally to the simplest and most deeply felt questions of the Christian life—became for me the best argument that there is a place in God's kingdom for a thinker, writer, and teacher.

When almost ten years later, with a wife, three children, and no savings, I entered a full-time program in church history at a Reformed evangelical seminary, I still wasn't as wholehearted in my worship and life as I knew God wanted me to be. I was still struggling with old habits. And I was still not very sure about this matter of "thinking for God."

But there stood Jonathan Edwards. Out of his careful reflections, Edwards had been used by God to shape America's first Christian revival. He had laid the foundations for an evangelical Christianity that was both theologically robust and spiritually impassioned.

In short, he had brought together head and heart in a way that, for me, a bookworm charismatic, was utterly convincing and motivating. And I hope some day to meet him and thank him personally.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History & Biography magazine.
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Issue 84, Fall 2004, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, Page 50