Can I Love Myself and Glorify God?

How can we truly love someone, Edwards asked, if we do not derive some kind of pleasure from loving them? “A benevolent propensity of heart is exercised, not only in seeking to promote the happiness of the being towards whom it is exercised, but also in rejoicing in his happiness.” When applied to Almighty God, the fountain of all beauty and being, we find our highest good and our greatest joy in loving him and being loved by him, consenting to the “head of the system, and the chief part of it.”

ABSTRACT: At the center of Jonathan Edwards’s theology of love was the concept of benevolence to Being in general. Edwards’s careful distinctions between self-love, selfishness, and disinterested benevolence depend on his understanding of God as the fountain of love, which he pours into the hearts of believers and empowers them to return. Self-love, which is the capacity to love or enjoy that which is pleasing, is regenerated by God so that his people are satisfied in him and seek for others to be satisfied in him as well.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Obbie Tyler Todd (PhD, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), teaching pastor of Cross Community Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, to explain how self-love and disinterested benevolence function in the theology of Jonathan Edwards.

In the history of Christianity, few theologians have earned as many nicknames as Jonathan Edwards. By the end of the eighteenth century, Yale President Timothy Dwight called his grandfather “that moral Newton, and that second Paul.”1 In the nineteenth, Dwight’s student Lyman Beecher called Edwards “the Luther of New England.”2 In the twentieth, Richard Niebuhr dubbed the Northampton pastor “America’s Augustine,” and Robert Jenson called him “America’s Theologian.”3 Welsh minister Martyn Lloyd-Jones labeled Edwards the “Theologian of Revival.”4 Even some of Edwards’s detractors have found it irresistible to tag him with a moniker of some kind. Alluding to his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), one scholar in 1930 titled Edwards “The Fiery Puritan.”5

The last nickname may have had the most enduring influence in popular thought. But Edwards spent far more time preaching and writing on the nature of love than he did on the agonies of hell. As philosopher William K. Frankena once noted, “In no field is his power more manifest than in moral philosophy.”6 For Edwards, love was more than a command or even “the chief of the affections”; it was the very reason life existed in the first place.7 Love was both an ethical and an ontological category, flowing from the nature of God’s very being. In The End for Which God Created the World, Edwards frames personal holiness as a process of “emanation and remanation” of God’s inner-Trinitarian fullness. God communicates his overflowing love to human beings who then, in the exercise of virtue, reflect that love back to God. The enjoyment of triune love is the sum and substance of the Christian life.8 God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.9

For this reason, one nickname has captured Edwards and his affectionate theology perhaps better than any other: “Theologian of the Great Commandment.” In a 1944 article by that title, Presbyterian scholar Joseph Haroutunian stated, “God blessed Jonathan Edwards with a unique sense and knowledge of His glory. . . . A love of God’s ‘infinite perfections’ is the source of the many sided work of Edwards as a theologian and the clue for understanding both his life and writings.”10 In short, love of God was the keystone of Edwards’s theology. What separated him from his contemporaries — and, indeed, his own disciples — was his unique ability to explain how a sinner could love his own life enough to give it away, and how a person seeking his highest personal good could in turn love his neighbor as himself. Lying at the intersection of the first and second commandments, the centerpiece of Edwards’s God-centered metaethics was something he called “benevolence to Being in general.” An examination into Edwards’s doctrine of selfless self-love can therefore begin with three B’s: benevolence, being, and beauty.

Metaphysics of Virtue

Edwards preached on moral theology long before writing his famous treatise on virtue. In his 1738 sermon series Charity and Its Fruits, which ethicist Paul Ramsey has called Edwards’s “most important treatment of Christian ethics,” Edwards defined love as “that disposition or affection by which one is dear to another” and “the sum of all virtue.”11 However, in The Nature of True Virtue (1765), Edwards did more than simply describe love; he offered a philosophically credible basis for the first and second commandments.

To demonstrate that naturalized ethics could not properly account for things like goodness and beauty, Edwards took on two of the preeminent moral philosophers of the eighteenth century: the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutchison. (Edwards was, after all, nicknamed “the apostle to the Enlightenment.”12) Using Hutchison’s model of moral formation for his own purposes, he showed that Hutchison’s notion of “moral sense” was, in the words of one historian, “no more than old-fashioned natural conscience in a new guise.”13 Because of original sin and moral inability, what human beings need to be virtuous lies outside them. In Religious Affections (1746), Edwards calls it a “new sense of the heart.”14

Edwards’s definition of true virtue rests primarily on two concepts: consent and Being in general. “True virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general. Or perhaps to speak more accurately, it is that consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general, that is immediately exercised in a general good will.”15 The theological glue that tied these concepts together, and the principle upon which Edwards hinged his entire conception of being, was beauty.16 For an act to be virtuous, and thus benevolent, it must be beautiful. “Beauty does not consist in discord and dissent,” Edwards explained, “but in consent and agreement.”17

Consent

For Edwards, beauty was less about appearances and more about relations. Whereas secondary beauty entails symmetry or proportion between things of similar quality or form and could be found in inanimate objects (such as triangles, chess boards, or trees), primary beauty entails a being consenting to another being — a “cordial,” heartfelt agreement between two wills.18 Contrary to modern stereotypes of beauty, this spiritual and moral beauty is not subjective but is rather an objective union of mind and heart.

Instead of merely observing beauty, redeemed sinners participate in divine beauty through the ultimate “bond of union” in Edwards’s aesthetic theology: the Holy Spirit. As the love of God personified, the Spirit unites the Father and Son, the human and divine natures in Christ, the sinner to the Savior, and the elect to one another.19 Through the indwelling of the third divine person, God literally pours his own love into a previously unbelieving heart and makes it beautiful with the very joy and harmony of the Trinity itself (Romans 5:5; John 17:21). In his unpublished treatise on the Trinity, Edwards contends that Christian love is none other than “participation of that same infinite divine love, which is GOD, and in which the Godhead is eternally breathed forth; and subsists in the third person in the blessed Trinity.” The Holy Spirit is God’s love, beauty, and “the summum of all good” given to the believer.20 Therefore, goodness and beauty must come from “the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty” — namely, God, who is “the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.”21

Sinners are not fountains of love by nature. Like those in Matthew 5:47 who greet only their own brothers, human beings do not possess the inherent ability to love anyone but themselves (or those like themselves). We need supernatural power to look beyond our own “private sphere” and to promote the “public good.”22 A tendency to agree with ourselves is a “natural principle,” Edwards reasoned, but “an agreement or union of heart to the great system, and to God the head of it, who is all and all in it — is a divine principle.”23 Since the supremely beautiful God agrees with and delights in his triune self, and since it is his fountain-like nature to communicate this eternal glory, God enlarges or repeats his inner-Trinitarian fullness in the creation and salvation of the world, producing “objects of his benevolence” that receive and replicate his love, made beautiful in the exercise of true virtue — his virtue.24

Being in General

The concept of “Being in general” is the ontological construct that allowed Edwards to explain how love of God and love of neighbor could coexist seamlessly in the same heart. (He was, after all, nicknamed the “Theologian of the Heart.”25) All intelligent beings are part of a vast interconnected system of being that Edwards called “the great whole.” Recognizing his place in this “universal system of existence,” a virtuous person cordially consents to the whole and exercises something Edwards calls “benevolence to Being in general.”26

The ethereal concept becomes more concrete once Edwards explains that God is the primary object of virtue because he comprises 99.99999999999[. . .] percent of this system of being.

John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Indiana University Press, 1998), 138.
Lyman Beecher, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints: A Sermon, Delivered at Worcester, Mass., Oct. 15, 1823 (Boston, 1823), 45. Historian Perry Miller observed, “Lyman Beecher was a spiritual grandson of Edwards, as Timothy Dwight was in the flesh.” The Life of the Mind in America (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 23–24.
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), xxvi; Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford University Press, 1988).
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors (Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 361.
Henry Bamford Parkes, Jonathan Edwards: The Fiery Puritan (Minton, Balch, and Company, 1930).
William K. Frankena, foreword to Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (University of Michigan Press, 1960), v.
Works of Jonathan Edwards (hereafter WJE), vol. 2, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (Yale University Press, 1959), 106.
Dane C. Ortlund similarly insists that Edwards’s “theological framework could be summarized in three words: triune beauty enjoyed.” “How to Read Jonathan Edwards,” in A Reader’s Guide to the Major Writings of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Nathan A. Finn and Jeremy M. Kimble (Crossway, 2017), 31.
See John Piper, “Was Jonathan Edwards a Christian Hedonist?” Desiring God, September 29, 1987, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/was-jonathan-edwards-a-christian-hedonist.
Joseph Haroutunian, “Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Great Commandment,” Theology Today 1, no. 3 (October 1944): 361. In 1966, Conrad Cherry concluded, “Joseph G. Haroutunian is probably correct in his judgment that Jonathan Edwards was first and last a ‘theologian of the Great Commandment.’ Love to God finds an emphasis in Edwards’ Protestant thought unparalleled by the earliest Protestant Reformers.” The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Indiana University Press, 1966), 77.
Charity and Its Fruits, in WJE, vol. 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1989), 89, 129.
Sydney E. Ahstrom, “Theology in America: A Historical Survey,” in The Shaping of American Religion, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton University Press, 1961), 245.
Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 106.
See Joe Rigney, “Religious Affections: A Reader’s Guide to a Christian Classic,” Desiring God, May 11, 2021, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/religious-affections.
The Nature of True Virtue, in WJE, vol. 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1989), 540.
Roland André Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (Yale University Press, 1968), 32.
WJE, 8:541.
WJE, 8:565.
Robert W. Caldwell has argued that “in Edwards’s theology, the Holy Spirit’s activity as the bond of the trinitarian union between the Father and the Son is paradigmatic for all other holy unions in his theology.” Preface to Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Wipf & Stock, 2006), xiii.
Quoted in William J. Danaher Jr., The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Westminster John Knox, 2004), 47, 42.
See Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford University Press, 2012), 535.
WJE, 8:540, 555.
WJE, 8:590.
McClymond and McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 529.
Harold P. Simonson, Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart (Mercer University Press, 1982).
WJE, 8:541, 551.

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Can I Love Myself and Glorify God?

The ‘disinterested benevolence’ of Jonathan Edwards.

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