A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards

First published: 1746

Edition(s) used:A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, edited by John E. Smith, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Perry Miller. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Spiritual treatise

Core issue(s): Awakening; guidance; heart; holiness; Holy Spirit; soul; virtue

Overview

An early convert to Calvinism, Jonathan Edwards was ordained minister of First Church, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1727, and through such provocative sermons as “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence” (1731), “A Divine and Supernatural Light” (1733), and “Justification by Faith Alone” (1734) became a central figure in the religious revival in New England that came to be known as the “Great Awakening.” Among his other important works are Freedom of the Will (1754), The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), and The Nature of True Virtue (1765).

In the preface to his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Edwards contends that there is no more important question than that concerning the distinguishing features of those who are truly religious and pious. The practical problem of distinguishing the truly pious from the fervent pretenders to piety arose in the spiritual excitement of the Great Awakening, during which it became difficult, if not impossible, to separate the truly holy from those whose emotional intensity and frenetic activity gave them the appearance but not the reality of virtue and piety.

Edwards was troubled, both spiritually and intellectually, by the confusion of emotionalism with true virtue. “There is indeed something very mysterious in it,” he writes, “that so much good, and so much bad, should be mixed together in the church of God.” Mysterious as it is, however, the coexistence of the true and the false in religion is something that must be acknowledged. “’Tis no new thing,” he adds, “that much false religion should prevail, at a time of great reviving of true religion; and that at such a time, multitudes of hypocrites should spring up among true saints.” The problem for Edwards, then, was that of distinguishing true religion from false, genuine piety from the counterfeit, sainthood from hypocrisy, and Christian spirituality from religious zealousness.

Edwards begins the task of resolving the problem by remarking on the love and joy of the Christian victims of religious persecution to whom Peter (in 1 Peter 1:8) wrote (with reference to Christ), “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.” Although the persecuted Christians did not see Christ, they loved him; although they suffered, they knew the joy of loving the divine. These religious affections—love and joy, founded in the divine—sustained and spiritually transformed these early Christians and thus were signs of their true piety, arising from the grace of God. Edwards’s reflections on Christian love and joy lead to the statement of his central proposition: “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”

In writing of the “affections,” Edwards was not referring to sentiments, feelings, or passions; he was writing of the “inclination and will” of the soul, the active tendency to embrace some things and turn away from others. He conceived of the spiritual affections pragmatically; he regarded them as dispositions to act, as established inclinations showing themselves in action.

A distinction is drawn by Edwards between the soul’s understanding, which is dependent upon perception and speculation, and the soul’s inclination, its capacity and tendency to approve or reject, to like or dislike, to be for some things and against others. When an inclination determines action, it may be called “will,” and when the mind is affected by inclinations, it may be called “heart.” The religious affections, then, are active inclinations affecting the will and the heart; and when they do so under the influence of the divine, they are true religious affections.

Since the affections are either positive or negative—either inclinations to approve or inclinations to reject—they involve either a “cleaving to . . . or seeking” something or, on the other hand, being averse to or opposed to something. Of the inclinations for something, Edwards gives as examples love, desire, hope, joy, gratitude, and complacence; as examples of inclinations against something, he cites hatred, fear, anger, grief, and the like. Some of the affections, Edwards points out, involve both positive and negative inclinations. Pity, for example, involves a positive inclination toward the sufferer and a negative inclination toward the suffering.

Although the religious affections are often of the mixed sort, involving love of the divine and hatred of sin and of Satanic influences, the love of God—that is, love directed toward the divine—is “the chief of the affections, and fountain of all other affections.” The two commandments given by Christ—to love God and, accordingly, to love one’s neighbor—“comprehend all the duty prescribed,” Edwards writes. Thus, “the essence of all true religion lies in holy love.”

In support of his general doctrine that true religion consists in the holy affections, Edwards emphasizes “vigorous and lively actings”; our wills and inclinations, he writes, must be “strongly exercised.” The affections are springs of human action, to be sure, but unless that action be earnest and enlist all our strength, it cannot be a sign of true piety.

Edwards argues that it is of no help in determining whether a person having religious affections has true religious affections, signs of true piety, to discover that the religious affections are intense (“in a very high degree”); nor is it significant if the affections appear to have bodily effects, such as trembling or fainting. Further, if someone having religious affections is “fluent, fervent and abundant” in talking about religious matters, it does not follow that such a person is truly pious, or not: Fervent protestations prove nothing. Nor does the fact that religious affections may arise in a person without any effort on that person’s part prove that the affections are supernaturally and divinely caused—nor that they are not. Finally, even if passages of Scripture come to mind and give rise to religious affections, nothing is shown either way about the truth of the affections.

One might suppose that the appearance of love could be taken to be significant in appraising the religious affections, but although love is “the chief of the graces of God’s spirit,” Edwards writes, it can be counterfeited, and hence no mere appearance of love proves that the reality of spiritual love is present.

Nor, Edwards continues, can one determine whether or not religious affections are “gracious,” signs of God’s grace, by noticing that, in a given case, the affections are many and varied, or that some persons experience comfort and joy after awakenings of conscience, or that people spend a great deal of time in zealous religious activity, or that they have their mouths full of praise for God, or that they are confident that their experience has a divine origin, or that what they do is pleasing to the truly godly.

If all these presumed indicators of true religion are false signs, what signs are reliable? Edwards offers twelve signs of holy affections, but he warns that no set of signs could enable anyone to determine with certainty whether someone enjoys true affections. The difficulty is not with the signs but with the use of them, with seeing clearly whether or not the signs are present. Nevertheless, the signs are useful in seeking understanding even though they can hardly be employed to convince hypocrites.

The true affections, first of all, arise from influences that are “spiritual, supernatural and divine.” Edwards states that “true saints” are “spiritual persons,” and he explains that by a “spiritual” person is meant one in opposition to a “natural” person, the latter being without benefit of the influence of the Spirit of God. To be spiritual is to be of the Spirit of God, and true spirituality consists in being affected by God’s grace.

The second sign of the true affections is that they have as their objective ground the excellence of divine things, not any benefit that might come to the person and thereby satisfy self-love. That is, God is loved as God and because of the glory and excellence of God, not because God might benefit those who love him.

One may take it as a sign of true affections that they are based on a love of the “beauty and sweetness” of the “moral excellency” of divine things. By “moral excellency,” Edwards means what we might call “spiritual” excellency, for the morality with which he is concerned does not relate to the practical benefits of certain modes of conduct in society but to the requirements of holiness or virtue. The moral excellency of God is God’s holiness; to love God for his holiness is to find his moral excellency beautiful and sweet and, hence, to take delight in that holiness.

The fourth sign of the true affections is that they arise from an enlightenment of the mind that consists in a true spiritual understanding of divine things. Spiritual understanding, Edwards avers, involves “a sense of the heart,” a heartfelt sense of spiritual beauty. Such understanding is not speculative; it involves a “taste” of the moral beauty of divine things—that is, a sense of their reality and a delight in their apprehension.

The spiritual conviction of the reality of divine things is a fifth sign of the true religious affections, provided that the conviction is “reasonable,” that is, that it arises from a spiritual understanding, a sense of the excellence and beauty of the divine.

Gracious affections, Edwards writes, “are attended with evangelical humiliation,” the sixth sign of the true affections. Edwards explains that by “evangelical humiliation” is meant “a sense that a Christian has of his own utter insufficiency, despicableness, and odiousness, with an answerable frame of heart.” Again, to be significant, the sense of one’s insufficiency must proceed not from the natural observation that one is limited in various ways but from a spiritual understanding of the difference between the perfections of God and the imperfections of the self, an understanding achieved through the influence of the Spirit of God.

The seventh sign of the true religious affections is that they are accompanied by a transformation of the soul brought about through spiritual understanding. Such transformation or “change of nature” is abiding; it is the permanent effect of the encounter with the Spirit.

The eighth sign is that, if the religious affections promote “the lamblike, dovelike spirit and temper of Jesus Christ,” their doing so is a sign of their being true and holy religious affections.

The ninth sign is that the religious affections soften the heart; they lead to a tenderness of spirit. Persons so affected become as little children.

The tenth sign is that truly gracious affections are proportionate to their objects; they exhibit “beautiful symmetry.” Some persons make a great show of loving God, but they show little love or benevolence in their relationships to other persons: In such persons there is an imbalance of concerns, a disproportion that is a sign of false affections.

The eleventh sign is that true affections give rise to an increase in spiritual appetite: “The more a true saint loves God with a gracious love, the more he desires to love him, and the more uneasy is he at his want of love to him.” The increase in spiritual longing is Edwards’s eleventh sign of the true affections.

The twelfth and final sign discussed by Edwards involves Christian practice: “Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice.” Christian practice, Edwards emphasizes, is “the chief of all the signs of grace”; it is the “principal sign” by which one can determine the truth or falsity of religious affections. Edwards argues at great length in support of this final definitive sign; he quotes extensively from Scripture, and he places special emphasis on Christ’s insistence that “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Unless the religious affections make a profound and Christian difference in practice, they are not signs of true piety.

Christian Themes

In a time of revivalism, when distinguishing between the truly pious and the merely exercised was paramount, Edwards worked to identify genuine “religious affections” both as a means of making that distinction and as a means of instructing. For Edwards, “affections” (corresponding to what we would now call emotions) were positive and negative inclinations of the soul; among the former are love, desire, hope, joy, gratitude, and complacence; among the latter are hatred, fear, anger, and grief. True religion consists, for the most part, in the true religious affections.

Love is the paramount religious affection. The preeminent virtue of Jesus Christ was expressed in the exercise of the holy affections. Among circumstances that cannot be taken as signs of true grace in persons having religious affections are their making fluent and fervent religious protestations, their spending much time in worship and other religious activities, their confidence about their own piety, and their happening to be pleasing to the truly godly.

Although there is no way of being certain about the piety of persons, there are twelve signs of the true religious affections: (1) They arise from spiritual, supernatural, and divine influences; (2) they are grounded in the excellence of divine things; (3) they are founded on the appeal of the moral excellence of divine things; (4) they arise from the mind’s enlightened understanding of divine things; (5) they are attended with a reasonable and spiritual conviction of the reality of divine things; (6) they are associated with honest humility; (7) they accompany a spiritual transformation; (8) they promote the spirit of love that Christ made evident; (9) they soften the heart; (10) they exhibit a beautiful symmetry and proportion; (11) they lead to an increase in the spiritual appetite for holiness; and (12) they have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice.

Although Edwards offers twelve signs of the true affections and, hence, of true religion, the argument for any one is but a special emphasis on a feature of a basic argument that covers them all; the spirit of a person may, through God’s grace, be affected by the Spirit of God; the sense of God gives rise to the holy affections; the holy affections, in turn, are springs of actions that reflect the beauty and holiness of their divine inspiration. To be truly religious and pious, then, is to be transformed by the religious affections arising from and reflecting the moral excellence of divine things: It is to love God.

Sources for Further Study

Crisp, Oliver D. Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. Chapters include “The Divine Decrees,” “Adam’s Fall,” “The Authorship of Sin,” “The Secret and Revealed Will of God,” “Temporal Parts and Imputed Sin,” and “Inherited Guilt.” Bibliography, index.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. Edited by Paul Ramsey. Vol. 1 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Perry Miller. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957. First published in 1754, this is Edwards’s philosophical masterpiece. In it, he argues for Calvinism against Arminianism and for the doctrine that freedom of the will is not only compatible with determinism but also requires it.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. Foreword by William K. Frankena. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. First published in 1765 (written in 1755), this statement is consistent with Edwards’s Treatise Concerning Religious Affections; here he argues that true virtue consists in benevolence to being in general, that is, “love to God,” and consequently that “virtue is the beauty of the qualities and exercises of the heart.”

Gura, Philip F. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. A full biography of Edwards from the early years to Princeton. Illustrated; bibliography, index.

Larsen, Dale. Jonathan Edwards—Renewed Heart: Six Studies for Individuals or Groups with Study Notes. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002. Offers six lessons on Christian living based on Edwards’s life and passages from Scripture.

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. Introduction by John F. Wilson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Wilson’s introduction sets the stage for students of Edwards. Bibliography, index.

Simonson, Harold P. Theologian of the Heart. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974. A careful, detailed, and rewarding study of Edwards’s conviction that virtue requires a “sense of the heart” as affected by the grace and glory of God.