Overture to a Symphony

Scripture focus

I will speak of the glorious honour of thy majesty, and of thy wondrous works.

Psalm 145:5 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the chapter

McClymond and McDermott open their study with a parable: concertgoers scattered through a hall each judge the symphony by whatever section reaches their seat most clearly — percussion, strings, woodwinds — and mistake their partial hearing for the whole. Jonathan Edwards's theology, they suggest, has suffered the same fate. Because his writings run to more than seventy volumes in the standard edition, most readers only ever encounter fragments, and generations of interpreters have built sweeping theories of 'the real Edwards' on whichever texts happened to be in front of them.

To hear Edwards rightly, the authors propose treating his theology as an orchestra whose sections must be heard together. The first and most foundational voice — the violins — is Edwards's doctrine of Trinitarian communication: God is, in Edwards's own phrase, a 'communicating being,' whose inner triune life of mutual love overflows outward into creation. This theme of divine beauty and self-giving communication, drawn especially from the Gospel of John, undergirds everything Edwards says about salvation, and later chapters trace how the other 'instruments' of his thought interweave with it.

The parable is also a caution to readers of this book itself: no single chapter, including this one, captures Edwards whole. The chapters that follow are best read as different vantage points on one continuous performance, and readers are urged toward the 'front-and-center' seat — attending to the whole rather than settling for a single favorite theme.

Key points

• Edwards's collected works span more than seventy volumes, so most readers — and even scholars — encounter only fragments of his thought.
• Differing scholarly portraits of Edwards often reflect which part of his writings an interpreter has emphasized, not necessarily error.
• McClymond and McDermott liken Edwards's theology to an orchestra with interwoven 'sections' that must be heard together, not in isolation.
• The foundational theme, likened to the violins, is Edwards's vision of God as a 'communicating being' whose triune love overflows into creation.
• Divine beauty is presented as inseparable from this communicative view of the Trinity, tying together doctrine, creation, and salvation.

A line worth remembering

God's beauty is the divinity of divinity, that which distinguishes God from everything else.

McClymond & McDermott The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, ch. 1

Related Scripture

• John 1:14
• 1 John 4:8
• Psalm 19:1
• Colossians 1:16

For reflection and discussion

1. Which parts of Christian doctrine do you tend to emphasize, and which do you tend to overlook?
2. How might reading a large body of someone's work only in fragments distort your understanding of them?
3. In what sense might it be true that God is, at his very nature, a 'communicating being'?