Religious Affections

A pastor in the Awakening

Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 in Connecticut, a minister's son, and studied at Yale. From the late 1720s he served the Congregational church of Northampton, Massachusetts, first beside his grandfather Solomon Stoddard and, after Stoddard's death in 1729, alone. Revival came to the town in 1734–35, and his account of it was read on both sides of the Atlantic. After George Whitefield toured New England in 1740 it spread again: the Great Awakening, told in Pietism and the Great Awakening.

It had its shadows. Some took outcries and fainting for sure signs of the Spirit. The itinerant James Davenport, trusting inward impulses as the Spirit's leading, denounced settled ministers as unconverted, and in 1744 retracted in print. The Boston minister Charles Chauncy held that an enlightened mind, not raised affections, should guide religion; alarmed at itinerants who unsettled the churches, he judged much of the revival to be enthusiasm (Seasonable Thoughts, 1743). Churches split between New Lights, who favoured the revival, and Old Lights, who opposed it.

Edwards defended the revival. In The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), first given at Yale's commencement in New Haven, he asked with the apostle John how to tell the Spirit's work from its counterfeits:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world.

1 John 4:1

Religious Affections came later, as the fervour cooled. Many scholars think it grew from sermons preached at Northampton in 1742–43; it was published at Boston in 1746. Not long before, Edwards writes, all high affections passed for grace: "This was the extreme which was prevailing three or four years ago" I.3.1.2. Now many rejected them all. He took neither side: "The right way, is not to reject all affections, nor to approve all; but to distinguish between affections, approving some, and rejecting others" I.3.1.7. The book neither dismisses the revival's affections nor trusts them. It tests them.

Three parts and twelve signs

The treatise has three parts. Part I asks what the affections are and why they matter. Its text is Peter's word to persecuted Christians whose faith showed itself in love and joy toward a Christ they had never seen:

Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with an inexpressible and glorious joy,

1 Peter 1:8

From it Edwards draws the sentence on which the book rests: "True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections" I.intro.11. He defines the affections, proves the doctrine in ten arguments and draws three inferences. Part II names twelve things that prove nothing either way, such as affections that run very high, affect the body, make people fluent in religious talk or very confident of their state: most of what enthusiasts took for proof of grace, and critics for proof of delusion.

Part III gives twelve signs. Gracious affections arise from the Spirit's influence (1); rest on the excellence of divine things in themselves (2), above all their holiness (3); spring from a mind enlightened (4) and convinced of divine things (5); come with evangelical humiliation (6), a change of nature (7), Christ's lamblike, dovelike spirit (8) and a tender heart (9); keep a beautiful symmetry (10); long for more the higher they rise (11); and bear fruit in practice (12).

The library holds five parts: Part I in two, with what the affections are, the ten arguments (the seventh from Christ himself) and the three inferences; and from Part III the cautions before the signs, Sign 1 as far as the new spiritual sense, all of Sign 2, and Sign 12's statement, three marks and reasons: where gracious affections come from, what they look at, and where they lead. Left out are the preface, Part II, Signs 3 to 11, and the rest of Signs 1 (on impressions and the witness of the Spirit) and 12. Yet Sign 12 calls back each earlier sign to show how it issues in practice III.12.27, so the missing ones can be glimpsed there.

Light and heat

By affections Edwards does not mean moods. Of the soul's two faculties, he says, the understanding perceives and judges; the inclination likes or dislikes, and is called the will as it governs action and the heart as it is exercised. "The affections are no other than the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul" I.1.2. Their seat is the soul, not the body, and they differ from passions, which are more sudden and leave the mind "less in its own command" I.1.9.

God asks for love with all the heart, and no one does anything in earnest unmoved: "he that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion" I.2.2.2. Scripture places religion in fear, hope, love, joy, sorrow, gratitude and zeal, and sums it up in love. Christ himself was "remarkably of a tender and affectionate heart" I.2.7; at the tomb of Lazarus, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).

Yet Edwards never measured religion by the size of a passing feeling, but "by the fixedness and strength of the habit that is exercised in affection" I.2.10.6. Even in true saints "their religious affections are often mixed; all is not from grace, but much from nature" I.2.10.6. Understanding and heart are light and heat: "where there is heat without light, there can be nothing divine or heavenly in that heart" I.3.1.3, and "a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart" I.3.1.3 has no spiritual knowledge. If the revival's critics feared heat without light, and its friends light without heat, Edwards asked for both. So preaching and song that move the heart are to be desired, provided they convey the truth; then "the more they have a tendency to move the affections the better" I.3.2.3.

From a new sense to fruit

Sign 1 asks where gracious affections come from. They "do arise from those influences and operations on the heart, which are spiritual, supernatural and divine" III.1.1. Spiritual means of the Holy Spirit, not of the soul as against the body. The Spirit acts on the unconverted too, waking conscience, helping natural gifts, even giving Balaam visions; but he only moves what nature has: "here is nothing supernatural and divine" III.1.19. In the saints he dwells as in his temple III.1.9, and in regeneration gives "a new spiritual sense" III.1.17, which differs from all that others perceive "as the sweet taste of honey is diverse from the ideas men have of honey by only looking on it, and feeling of it" III.1.17. As Paul says, "The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God" (1 Corinthians 2:14). The visions, voices and impressions many in the revival trusted prove nothing on their own.

Sign 2 asks what they look at. Their first ground is "the transcendently excellent and amiable nature of divine things as they are themselves; and not any conceived relation they bear to self, or self-interest" III.2.1. To those who say all love is self-love, Edwards replies that placing one's happiness in God is already the fruit of love III.2.4. Self-love can stir strong feeling toward God; the difference is the order. "The saint's affections begin with God" III.2.14, while "the hypocrite lays himself at the bottom of all, as the first foundation, and lays on God as the superstructure" III.2.14. Edwards also answers the objection drawn from John:

We love because He first loved us.

1 John 4:19

Our love is the gift of God's love, he replies, and that love shown in redemption is a chief part of the glory for which we love him III.2.20. The danger lies with those who admire their own experiences: "they take more comfort in their discoveries than in Christ discovered" III.2.23.

Sign 12 asks where they lead: "Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice" III.12.1. It means conduct "universally conformed to, and directed by Christian rules" III.12.2, made "the business of his life" III.12.2 and kept to the end. Paul warns of those "having a form of godliness but denying its power" (2 Timothy 3:5), and Edwards says where that power shows: "Herein chiefly appears the power of true godliness, viz., in its being effectual practice" III.12.15. False affections are like a statue that looks alive and does nothing, or the seed on stony ground III.12.14:

The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he remains for only a season. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away.

Matthew 13:20-21

On the temple candlestick "the flower and the fruit were constantly connected, without fail" III.12.30, as a fair profession is joined to holy practice. In the rest of Sign 12, not held here, he calls practice the chief of all the signs, to others and to one's own conscience. Jesus said, "by their fruit you will recognize them" (Matthew 7:20). This is not righteousness by works, for "true faith, by which persons rely on the righteousness of Christ … is evermore accompanied with such a spirit of earnestness in the Christian work and course" III.12.7. Fruit is not the root; it shows that the root is alive.

The third mark ties Sign 12 to the Reformed teaching on the perseverance of the saints. True saints may fall into sin, "yea great sins" III.12.11, Edwards says, but never fall away from God's service; of those who do, "it is a sign they never were risen with Christ" III.12.11. Wesleyans and other Arminians, who believe that a true believer can wilfully fall away and return by repentance, read such words as a warning to endure. Both hold that faith without fruit is not living faith. See Can salvation be lost? and Holiness and perseverance.

Reading it well

Dismissed by his congregation in 1750 after a dispute over who should be admitted to the Lord's Supper, Edwards preached to Native Americans at Stockbridge, and died after a smallpox inoculation in 1758, weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). John Wesley published an abridgment in the 1770s, fearing, his preface says, that its subtle distinctions, framed, he thought, to defend the perseverance of the saints, would make plain believers doubt God's work in them; yet he kept much of great use to God's children. Pastors have reached for it ever since to weigh reports of revival and conversion.

It keeps the shape of a Puritan sermon: a text, a doctrine, numbered proofs and inferences. Read one argument at a time. The English is Edwards's own, from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library's text: a professor is one who professes religion, sensible means felt, complacence delight, a discovery a disclosure, a frame a state of mind, a knop an ornamental knob; the animal spirits were a fluid the medicine of his day thought ran in the nerves.

Do not use the signs as a weapon. To know with certainty who is a true believer and who a hypocrite is not given us: "it was God's design to reserve this to himself, as his prerogative" III.pre.3. Nor should a troubled believer lean on them alone, for "Assurance is not to be obtained so much by self-examination, as by action" III.pre.8; Paul, Edwards says, won assurance of the prize more by running than by considering. If the sharp words on hypocrites drive a tender conscience to endless self-suspicion, as Wesley feared, go back to Sign 2: affections founded "out of self in God and Jesus Christ" III.2.27 are purified by self-knowledge, not destroyed. The book aims not at doubt but at the "joy unspeakable and full of glory" of its text I.text. The sense Edwards likened to tasting honey, a psalm puts in a line:

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!

Psalm 34:8