GABOURY’S CRITICAL BOOK REPORT
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and other Writings (1700’s; Nashville , Tennessee
The selection contains four sermons, An Essay on the Trinity, and the Freedom of the Will. This is a very odd selection. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is as mighty a sermon as the
title promises. And it was mightily used by God to awaken sinners: “Those of
you that finally continue in a natural condition, that shall keep out of hell
longest will be there in a little time! your damnation does not slumber” (p.
16.) The Presence is felt in that sermon more than in the other three, though
all are good. The essay on the trinity, by today’s standard, is also good, but
it does not compare well with so much else that Edwards has written. The
rhetoric is complicated, and it is a real pain to decipher.
The Freedom of
the Will must be about as abstract and esoteric as any theorem in
existence. I have little doubt that Edwards is right and the Arminian is wrong.
But who is sharp enough to follow Edwards down such narrow corridors of reason?
Like most philosophy, this must be gotten through only by the stubborn reader.
Who can labor through this without leaving so many parts unknown? The
difference between Necessity and necessary, and between impossible and
Impossibility, are these necessary to state and possible to fathom? (p. 125.)
About Edwards’ philosophical subtleties, John Erskine says this in his Advertisement (1774) to Edwards’ History of Redemption: “the abstruse
nature of the subject, or the subtle objections of opposers of the truth, led
him to more abstract and metaphysical reasonings.” (He is not speaking there, of the History of Redemption, though.) Edwards’ Freedom of the Will is the domain of “divines, metaphysicians, and
logical writers,” as Mr. W. the Editor calls them in a note (not in this
edition.) This being the case, do we not require the full disclosure of what Edwards worked so hard to prove before we
can hope to grasp more than a few slivers of what he meant? When Volume One of Edwards’ Works providentially came into my hands,
I discovered that I had struggled to understand the Freedom of the Will with only part of the treatise to read! Thanks
Nelson Publishers!
Over twenty percent of the Will is missing in Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God and other Writings by Thomas Nelson Publishers.
There is no indication of omission in the Publisher’s Preface, and none in the
Introduction—yet the Will’s Preface,
its Footnotes, even vast Sections of
the grand Treatise itself, and the Appendix, and even the Conclusion—are all
omitted! On Nelson’s final page, it says, The
End, as if to cause the impression that we’ve just read the full version.
With something as important and hard to comprehend as the operation of man’s
will, by which our choice for evil or good is made in consequence to eternity,
what are we to make of Nelson’s deletions? Even the conclusion is dropped from
the Farewell Sermon, which is where
Edwards extends his love to that guilty, ungrateful congregation that
dishonorably voted him out. It’s as if this selection of abridged material is
painstakingly calculated to give the reader a low opinion of Edwards. I
recommend Hendrickson’s edition of his Works.
For help in understanding Edwards’ treatise on the
will, I recommend the essay by William Cunningham: Calvinism, and the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity. This may be
found in The Reformers and the Theology
of the Reformation (1862.)
Content: ? (This Nelson
Royal Classic is a royal rip-off.)
Style: ?
(Nothing is so disorienting as omission.)
Tone: ?
(Abridgments are ugly; beguiling Publishers, uglier.)
Grading Table: A: a keeper: reread it; promote it;
share it.
B: an average book: let it go.
C: read only if you
have to.
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