As some of you know, I have developed a healthy obsession with Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) over the last year. Today as I was reading Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, the following paragraph struck me as a succinct summary of Edwards’ contribution to Christian thought:
Edwards’s efforts to think in comprehensive terms about the world and humanity’s place in the world enabled him to gain perspective on most of the major intellectual challenges of his day. The lesson he offers to later Christians lies partly in the actual conclusions he reached. Even more, it lies in his effort to think about the major questions of life distinctly as a Christian, from a Christian base, and with Christian principles.
The career of Jonathan Edwards shows us how fruitful it can be to love the Lord with the whole mind… It is not simply advantageous to love the Lord with the mind; it is also good, sweet, holy, beautiful, and honoring to God. The last reward to be had from the exercise of a Christian mind is to know God better, and that reward requires no other justification.
This is why I love education.
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Source: Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 79-80.
I love that… “healthy obsession”