Charity and Its Fruits - Banner of Truth (Edwards)

Description

Few Christian leaders since the Reformation have been as gifted as Jonathan Edwards. A man of intense personal devotion to Christ, he was a leader of revival, and a creative Reformed theologian as well as being a missionary and a philosopher fully meriting Hugh Martin’s description of him as ‘that greatest of metaphysical divines’.

Yet it is likely that he would have preferred to be remembered simply as ‘pastor of the Church of Northampton’. Preached in 1738 (the same year that Edwards published A Narrative of Surprising Conversions), Charity and Its Fruits gives us an insight into his regular pulpit ministry in the years between the Northampton revival of 1735 and ‘the Great Awakening’ of 1740.

Entirely free from sentimentality this moving exposition of 1 Corinthians 13, like the better known Religious Affections, reveals Edwards’ insistence both that true Christian experience is ‘supernatural’- Spirit produced and Christ centered- and that ‘all true Christian grace tends to practice’. Charity and Its Fruits show how it is possible to steer between Arminianism on the one hand and Antinomianism on the other. The concluding chapter on heaven as a world of love is perhaps the most beautiful in all Edwards’s writings.

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Table of Contents:

1. All True Grace in the Heart Summed up in Charity, or Love
2. Charity, or Love, More Excellent Than the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit
3. All That can be Done or Suffered in Vain Without Charity, or Love
4. Charity Meek in Bearing Evil and Injuries
5. Charity Cheerful and Free in Doing Good
6. The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of an Envious Spirit
7. The Spirit of Charity an Humble Spirit
8. The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of a Selfish Spirit
9. The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of an Angry or Wrathful Spirit
10. The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of a Censorious Spirit
11. All True Grace in the Heart Tends to Holy Practice in the Life
12. Charity Willing to Undergo all Sufferings for Christ
13. All the Christian Graces Connected and Mutually Dependent
14. Charity, or True Grace, Not to be Overthrown by Opposition
15. The Holy Spirit for Ever to be Communicated to the Saints, in Charity, or Love
16. Heaven, A World of Charity or Love

Author

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) served the Northampton Congregational Church in Massachusetts for twenty-three years, then missionary outpost to the Mohawk and Mohican tribes. In 1758, he became president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Edwards "is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian," and one of America's greatest intellectuals.