‘Religious Affections’: Textbook of the American Soul

For generations, evangelicals have been convinced that the works of Jonathan Edwards would remain indelibly in the American mind. In 1832, the young abolitionist Henry B. Stanton declared, “Edwards will live a thousand lives by means of his written works.”¹ The famous revivalist and reformer Lyman Beecher, noting the timeless quality of Edwards’s writings, called the Northampton theologian “the immortal Edwards.”²

Today, these assumptions have by no means proven false. In the past thirty years, the theology of Jonathan Edwards has — once again — enjoyed a renaissance. However, of all Edwards’s masterpieces, none has proven as long-lasting and as universally appealing as Religious Affections (1746), a text that one scholar has called “one of the most profound works of spiritual discernment in the history of the church.”³ Edwards’s most penetrating treatise has become his most enduring.

Religious Affections Revised

By the time Edwards passed in 1758, his most well-known work was The Life and Diary of David Brainard (1749), a biographical account of a missionary to the Delaware Indians of New Jersey. Going through thirty editions, it became one of the best-selling religious books in the nineteenth century. But Edwards had been inspired to write about Brainerd because the young missionary’s life provided a perfect case study of the religious affections. In fact, when it was first published, The Life of Brainerd was used as a companion volume to Religious Affections.⁴ Brainerd’s life modeled well Edwards’s idea that “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”⁵

After the “great bodily agitations” of the Cane Ridge Revival were unleashed in Kentucky in 1801, many evangelicals reached for Religious Affections to assess whether the event was indeed a work of the Spirit of God. “O that the less informed among the Americans,” warned one Kentuckian in 1802, “were in possession of President Edwards’s excellent volume on the Affections, and would most seriously read it.”⁶ Nevertheless, it was not until decades later, during the later phases of the Second Great Awakening, that Edwards’s most enduring theological work was regularly reprinted.⁷

Ironically, the version of Religious Affections that many Americans were reading was not the original Religious Affections. Newly established denominational and interdenominational presses often printed abridged versions that cut out Edwards’s Calvinism along with aesthetic concepts like “moral beauty,” “excellency,” and “sweetness” that were deemed too perplexing for a lay audience. Unfortunately, these omissions eviscerated many of the basic ideas of the treatise.⁸ John Wesley famously described Religious Affections as a “dangerous heap, wherein much wholesome food is mixed with much deadly poison” (by which the staunchly Arminian Wesley meant Calvinism).

Nevertheless, Wesley still published his own ultra-edited, bowdlerized version of Religious Affections. Amazingly, Wesley’s version was only a sixth of the original size, reducing Edwards’s twelve signs of godly affections to eight.⁹ So taken was Wesley with Religious Affections that one scholar has submitted that it was key to his thinking.¹⁰ Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury’s praise of the work was very similar to Wesley’s. Except for “the small vein of Calvinism which runs through it,” Asbury found it to be “a very good treatise, and worthy [of] the serious attention of young professors.”¹¹

Religious Affections Repurposed

Due to Edwards’s power to capture the inner workings of the soul and “the springs of men’s actions,” it was seemingly inevitable that Religious Affections would be co-opted by those whose theological beliefs did not remotely resemble those of its author. The most well-known revivalist of the Second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney, credited Edwards’s Religious Affections as a primary source of inspiration for his “new measures.” Incredibly, the man who contended that revival was “not a miracle” appealed to the man who insisted “that God alone can bestow it.”¹²

In 1827, for example, Finney cited Religious Affections against his detractor, Asahel Nettleton, to justify his novel brand of revivalism (while Nettleton himself quoted Edwards back to Finney). Finney had first perused the monumental work in the home of a friend during his ministry in the “Burned-Over District” of western New York. However, as Finney biographer Keith J. Hardman insists, “If Charles Finney claimed to derive his arguments from Edwards’ Religious Affections, the question can be legitimately asked, Had Finney read beyond the first thirty pages?” Hardman then concludes, “Finney skimmed the book, took from it what he agreed with, cast the remainder aside — and then claimed to be following Edwards!”¹³

Finney’s misuse of Religious Affections was not the only such example of theological tone deafness. In 1835, Unitarian minister John Brazer described Edwards’s magnum opus in the Christian Examiner as “a book which is now in unquestioned repute, and which . . . has been referred to and quoted, reprinted and circulated by the predominant class of Christians in this country, with a deference only less than that which is paid to the Bible itself.”¹⁴ Astonishingly, one of the most hearty endorsements of Religious Affections came from the mouth of a heretic. Edwards’s work was consumed not just by those who opposed Calvinism but by those who opposed the doctrine of the Trinity!

“Edwards’s most penetrating treatise has become his most enduring.”

Still, the greatest testament to the wealth of moral theology contained in Religious Affections is its widespread reception among orthodox evangelicals in both the North and South during a time when Americans were finding less and less in common. In Georgia, Baptist Jesse Mercer published a lengthy excerpt of the treatise in the Christian Index.¹⁵ Calling Edwards “the ablest theologian of his time,” Francis Wayland, the president of Brown University and the leading ethicist of his generation, once asked his students at chapel, “Who of us have not examined his title to Heaven more carefully by the aid derived from the ‘Treatise on the Religious Affections’ of Edwards?”¹⁶ In 1852, an evangelical in the New Englander agreed that Religious Affections had become “the text-book of Christendom on experimental religion.”¹⁷ So much weight did Rev. S.C. Aiken in Utica, New York, ascribe to the masterpiece that he confessed that “next to the Bible, no book was read so much in my family” as Religious Affections.¹⁸ Even evangelicals in the Episcopal Church were influenced by the work, using it as a spiritual guidebook.¹⁹

Religious Affections Renewed

Traditionally, historians have recognized that interest in the writings and theology of Jonathan Edwards reached a nadir in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of scholarly ebb that eventually flowed with the work of Harvard professor Perry Miller in the late 1940s.²⁰ However, Edwards was not forgotten during this time. In 1882, renowned Bible scholar Calvin Stowe (husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe) confessed to a friend, “I am, and always have been in the main, a Calvinist of the Jonathan Edwards school.”²¹ When it seemed that the study of many of Edwards’s works was marginal at best, Religious Affections still exerted an influence upon the American mind.

Whereas in the nineteenth century the famous spiritual textbook inspired pastors, revivalists, and laypeople, at the turn of the twentieth century it garnered interest in more philosophical and academic circles. For example, in 1900, when Harvard philosopher William James made his argument for pragmatism — the belief that ideas must be evaluated by their results or outcomes rather than by truth — he appealed to Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections: “There is not one grace of the Spirit of God of the existence of which, in any [believer], Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.”²² Edwards was an unlikely source of inspiration for James, who rejected historic Christianity. Nevertheless, James respected Edwards’s reasoning ability and sometimes quoted him at length.²³

By the late 1930s, Yale theologian and ethicist Richard Niebuhr was writing about Jonathan Edwards’s notion of religious affections.²⁴ Acknowledging Edwards as an intellectual mentor, Niebuhr later drew from Religious Affections to defend the value of religious knowledge in relating to God.²⁵ However, it wasn’t until the 1960s, with the work of Presbyterian theologian John Gerstner and others, that “Edwards studies began to lift from the runway to the cruising altitude of 2003 levels of publication and interest,” a stretch of time that saw the publication of John Piper’s Desiring God (1986), a book deeply influenced by Edwards.²⁶

In the past twenty years, in large part because of Piper’s ministry, a movement of Calvinist evangelicals dubbed by Collin Hansen the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” has championed the works of the “immortal Edwards.” Recently, as the movement has faced theological, moral, and social challenges, Hansen himself has attempted to chart a “way forward” by consulting a long-trusted resource for holy living: Religious Affections.²⁷ It seems Edwards’s work has been passed down to another generation of American evangelicals as their favorite spiritual textbook.

Take Up and Read

One of the primary reasons Religious Affections has enjoyed such longevity in the American mind is that it seeks to answer a question with which many Americans are preoccupied: What is true religion? For as long as Christians have sought to make God their heart’s desire and to discern spiritual fruit in their own lives, Jonathan Edwards has offered a thorough blueprint of their own souls and a guide with which to understand the nature of biblical faith. The late Presbyterian theologian R.C. Sproul, for instance, modeled much of his 1992 book The Soul’s Quest for God after Religious Affections.²⁸ Edwards’s monumental work still offers a how-to manual in searching our own souls.

Therefore, for Christians today, Religious Affections is as relevant as the day it was written. While the language is not always of our own time, the subject remains the most important in the Christian life: living for God. Next to the scholarly edition by Yale University Press (edited by John E. Smith), Banner of Truth also offers a version faithful to the original. By diagnosing the exercises of the will and “the spring of men’s actions,” Edwards continues to aid believers in obeying the opening verse of the book: “Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8 KJV).