Edwards on Holiness

Holiness is the nature of the Spirit of God, therefore He is called in Scripture the Holy Ghost. Holines, which is as it were the beauty and sweetness of the divine nature, is as much the proper nature of the Holy Spirit as heat is the nature of fire, or as sweetness was the nature of that holy anointing oil which the principal type of the Holy Ghost in the Mosaic dispensation... The Spirit of God so dwells in the heats of the saints that He there, as a seed or spring of life, exerts and communicates Himself, in this His sweet and divine nature, making the soul a partaker of God's beauty and Christ's joy, so that the saint has truly fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ, in this having the communion or participation of the Holy Ghost. The grace which is in the hearts of the saints is of the same nature with the divine holiness, as much as it is possible for that holiness to be which is infinitely less in degree; as the brigfhtness that is in a diamond which the sun shines upon is of the same nature with the brightness of the sun, but only that it is as nothing to it in
degree... The Religious Affections, p. 129

Wonderful stuff. I wonder what an Orthodox view of divinization might be like in comparison? Notice, however, that the holiness is beautiful and sweet - and not sweetness and beauty which is holy. He is not an aesthete. The holiness of the Christian is truly divine.

Jonathan Edwards on preaching

Well this is too good not to note:

...the impressing divine things on the hearts and affections of men is evidently one great and main end for which God has ordained that His Word delivered in the holy Scriptures should be opened, applied, and set home upon men, in preaching. And therefore it does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; becasue although these may tend as well as preaching to give men a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the things of the Word of God, yet theu have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's heats and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of His Word to men in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of the things of religion, and their own misery and necssity of a remedy, and the glory and sifficiency of a remedy provided; and to stir up the pure minds of the saints and quicken their affections, by often bringing the great things of religion to their remebrance and setting them before them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in the already...

Edwards' Religious Affections is to my mind the best piece on Christian spirituality there is. He got the emotions just right it seems to me. What I can't understand is why conservatives and charismatics don't sit down and read it together: I think both groups would feel rebuked and encouraged by what he says.

(it almost makes up for that terrible sermon, Sinners in the hands of an angry God. But that's another story...)

God is beauty

"God is beauty; to be God is to be enjoyable... God's beauty is the actual living exchange between Father, Son and Spirit as this exchange is perfect simply as exchange, as it sings." Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology I.235

Jonathan Edwards privileged beauty in his doctrine of God: God is truth and goodness because he is beauty, 'beauty of the sort music has'. This is his glory.

In a discussion of feminine beauty elsewhere, people were quick to raise the passage in 1 Peter about the prominence of character as the truly beautiful adornment of a woman's life (as opposed to bling bling...). Edwards would agree, pointing out that beauty and virtue are in close connection. But it is still an aesthetic quality, regardless. To talk of God's beauty is to talk of how God is sensed, for example.