October 15, 2008

By the time I got half way through Jonathan Edward’s A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, I was worried.  Writing in 1746, Edwards began:

There is no question whatsoever, that is of greater importance to mankind, and that it more concerns every individual person to be well resolved in, than this, what are the distinguishing qualifications of those that are in favor with God, and entitled to his eternal rewards? Or, which comes to the same thing, What is the nature of true religion?

Or to put it yet another way, how do I know I am really a Christian?

The first half of the book is less than comforting.  It is a wonderful thing, Edwards wrote, to have a conversion experience, love reading the Bible, know true doctrine, go to church, enjoy worship, sing hymns when no one is listening, serve others, and happily perform all manner of other Christian duties and activities.  It is all commendable (at least on some level), but, he warns, none of those things can be trusted as a clear indication that you are actually someone saved by grace.

For Edwards, there is only one decisive indicator that we are walking in fellowship with God through faith in Jesus Christ:  transformed affections.  The true believers are marked by what they love.

For Edwards, affections move us in all our actions.  Those affections are either ordered to toward the wrong objects or the right objects.  He wrote:

‘Tis affection that engages the covetous man, and him that is greedy of worldly profits, in his pursuits; and it is by the affection, that the ambitious man is put forward in his pursuit of worldly glory; and ‘tis the affections also that actuate the voluptuous man, in his pursuit of pleasure and sensual delights: the world continues, from age to age, in a continual commotion and agitation, in a pursuit of these things; but take away all affection, and the spring of all this motion would be gone, and the motion itself would cease. And as in worldly things, worldly affections are very much the spring of men’s motion and action; so in religious matters, the spring of their actions are very much religious affections: he that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.