Jonathan Edwards on the Death of a Saint: Part 1

English Literature classes have been unfriendly toward the New England Puritan, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). I remember my high school teacher depicting images of a stern, Northampton preacher of strictly denunciatory sermons, using his infamous Enfield Sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God,” as the typical of his content and character. But modern scholarship offers a much more accurate account of a man of earnest piety, profound theological and philosophical penetration, and genuine love for the Savior and His Church.

One unfortunate consequence of history’s painting Edwards with harsh strokes has been the neglecting of the aesthetic and humane dimensions of his Christian thought and practice. But these key principles, too, have come under the examination of scholars. One now finds Edwards frequently commenting on the beautiful things about nature, life, and Christ, and he also manifests a creative perception of beauty when considering the most morose of topics: Death. This surprised me. His employment of elegant, almost poetic language in his private “Miscellanies” notebooks helps to give a fuller expression to the gracefulness with which he approached not just life, but even death. Jonathan Edwards was not obsessed with judgment and punishments of God, but with His beauty and glory because Christ infuses life with beauty and glory. Preachers today have something to learn from his remarkable Christological handling of death.

The presence of death was never very far from the Edwards home. The rugged conditions of the primitive and largely unsettled western Connecticut River Valley was often cruel to its settlers and inhabitants. Harsh winters, the threat of hostile French Catholic invaders from the North, Indian raids, disease, and even earthquakes made the frangible existence of Northampton and Stockbridge settlers all the more precarious. But more immediately, Edwards personally knew the company of death within his own home.

His grandmother, Esther Stoddard, died in February 1736, leaving Edwards to preach her funeral sermon. Her renowned piety and “godly conversation” warranted, in Edwards’s appraisement, preaching from the text of Revelation 14:13 (from the King James Version), “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.” Edwards extracted from this text the doctrine: “When saints depart out of this for another world, their works do follow them.”^[1] The only work that avails toward Heaven comes from Jesus’ response to the question, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Our Lord says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 28, 29). Faith in Christ is what matters, and Edwards saw that Christian living, good works, follows from it and are magnified in death.

Faith in Christ is what matters, and Edwards saw that Christian living, good works, follows from it and are magnified in death.

In addition to the loss of these “eminent saints,” Edwards was to endure the loss of his dear friend and confidant, David Brainerd. Brainerd, the twenty-nine-year-old missionary to the Indians of New Jersey, died of tuberculosis in the Edwards home on October 1747. But before the winter which began with the death of Brainerd was over, Jershua Edwards, Jonathan Edwards’s second eldest daughter who cared for Brainerd the last weeks of his life, fell fatally ill and, within a week, died in February 1748.

What did Edwards think of these tragic deaths? Despite the encroachment of death upon those dear to his heart and within his own home, Jonathan Edwards held a remarkably optimistic perspective on death. For instance, while reflecting upon the recent deaths of David Brainerd and Jershua, Edwards recorded his thoughts in a notebook entry written in early 1748:

“When the fruit is ripe, it is easily gathered. It does not cleave fast to the tree, but is ready to quit it, and is picked without rending or making any wound. So is a saint that is ripe for Heaven; he easily quits this world (Job 5:26).”^[2]

Particularly notable in this entry is the reference to Job 5:26: “Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season.” Here, Edwards finds that the fright and suffering of death now becomes, for the saint, a thing as timely and pleasant as matured fruit almost dropping into the hands of the gardener (Christ), or as a sheaf of grain naturally ripened in its season.

However, Edwards would not allow there to be any confusing of his thoughts on the pleasant transition of death. Death, he would remind us, is only a pleasant thing in as much as it is the death of a saint. Confident in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ and the operation of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, Edwards appropriately reflects on the saint’s death as in Christ.

--------

^[1] Iain H. Murray. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Edinburgh, Scotland: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987. 180.

^[2] “Images,” No. 192, Typological Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 11, eds. W. E. Anderson, M. I. Lowance, Jr., D. Watters. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993. 123.