Friday, April 22, 2005

Jonathan Edwards on Hot Orthodoxy

"God is glorified within Himself these two ways: 1. By appearing... to Himself in His own perfect idea [of Himself], or in His Son, who is the brightness of His glory. 2. By enjoying and delighting in Himself, by flowing forth in infinite . . . delight towards Himself, or in his Holy Spirit...So God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to... their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which He makes of Himself...God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God's glory [doesn't] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it."

(Jonathan Edwards, The "Miscellanies," ed. by Thomas Schafer, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas Schafer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 495, Miscellany #448; see also #87, pp. 251-252; #332, p. 410; #679 (not in the New Haven volume); emphasis added.)

I found this in John Piper's keynote address to the October 2003 Jonathan Edwards Conference entitled: A God-Entranced Vision of All-Things Why We Need Jonathan Edwards Three Hundred Years Later

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