The Work
Jonathan Edwards's A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections was published in Boston in 1746, seven years after the height of the Great Awakening in New England and five years after the intense local revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, that Edwards had narrated in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737). It is Edwards's most mature and sustained work of practical theology, addressing a question that the revivals had made urgent: how do we distinguish genuine religion from counterfeit? The treatise runs to nearly 400 pages in the Yale critical edition and is organized in three parts: the first establishing the centrality of affections to religious life; the second cataloguing signs that do not reliably indicate genuine religion; and the third presenting twelve positive signs of the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul.
The work was written in response to two opposite errors that the revivals had produced: the enthusiasm of George Whitefield's more extreme followers, who took any strong emotional experience as evidence of divine grace; and the rationalism of those who dismissed the entire revival as mere emotionalism. Edwards argued that both errors missed the proper understanding of the affections and their role in genuine religion.
Biblical Engagement
1 Peter 1:8 ('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') is the key text for Edwards's entire argument. The verse describes the experience of Christians who have genuine love for Christ and genuine joy in that love, despite not seeing him physically. Edwards uses this text to establish that the affections - love, joy, grief, hope, fear - are not peripheral to Christian life but central to it: the Christian life is constituted by its affections, and the quality of those affections is the most reliable indicator of the state of the soul.
1 John 4:7 ('Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God') is the Johannine test of genuine religion that is the basis of Edwards's twelfth and most important sign. Edwards argues, following John, that love - specifically the love produced by the Holy Spirit, as described in Galatians 5:22 - is the most reliable of all the signs of grace, because love of a particular kind (humble, self-forgetful, directed toward God and neighbor) cannot be counterfeited by human effort or demonic deception. Everything else that people might take as evidence of grace - visions, ecstasies, strong emotional experiences, confident assurance - can be produced by other means, but the Johannine love that 'suffereth long, and is kind' (1 Corinthians 13:4) cannot.
Matthew 7:20 ('Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them') is Jesus's hermeneutical principle for evaluating religious claims, and it is Edwards's fundamental methodological premise. The twelve signs he presents in Part Three are all forms of 'fruit' - evidence visible in the transformed life - rather than forms of subjective experience. Edwards consistently pushes against the instinct to take inner experiences as the decisive evidence of grace and insists on the visibility of grace in a transformed character and practice.
Galatians 5:22 ('But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith') is the Pauline inventory of spiritual fruit that informs Edwards's account of genuine affections. Edwards does not simply assert that the fruits of the Spirit are the signs of grace; he provides a sophisticated psychological and theological analysis of what makes these particular qualities evidence of divine work rather than human achievement.
Author and Context
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was the most important theologian in the history of American Christianity and one of the most important philosophers of his age. Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son of eleven children, he entered Yale at thirteen, graduated at seventeen, and served as a tutor there before being called as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard at Northampton, Massachusetts. When Stoddard died in 1729, Edwards became the full pastor and presided over the Northampton congregation during the extraordinary religious upheaval of the 1730s and 1740s.
Edwards was a careful observer of the psychological dimensions of religious experience: he kept detailed notes on the conversions in his congregation, interviewed individuals about their experiences, and developed a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between the emotions, the will, and the intellect in spiritual transformation. The Religious Affections is the systematic outcome of this empirical observation, combining the categories of John Locke's empirical psychology with the Reformed theological tradition of his Puritan inheritance.
The immediate context of the Religious Affections was the controversy following the Great Awakening. George Whitefield's tour of New England in 1740 had produced extraordinary emotional scenes - crying, fainting, physical convulsions - in Edwards's own congregation and throughout the region. Edwards had initially endorsed the revival and then grown increasingly uneasy as extremist responses - the 'New Light' faction that took emotional excess as the primary criterion of genuine conversion - became more prominent. The Religious Affections is his attempt to provide a theological framework that honors the genuine work of the Spirit in the revivals while establishing criteria that can distinguish it from enthusiasm and self-deception.
The Twelve Signs
Edwards's twelve signs of genuine religious affections are among the most penetrating analyses of spiritual experience in Christian literature. The positive signs include: affections arising from divine influence (not from natural causes); the affections having the spiritual beauty of divine things as their object; being founded on moral excellency (not merely the benefit one receives from God); arising from enlightening the understanding; being attended with evangelical humility; being attended with a change in nature; being attended with meekness, gentleness, and love; having symmetry and proportionality; being attended with a tender conscience; being consistent with the increase of appetites for spiritual things; and (the twelfth and most important) the practice of Christian virtue as the evidence that transforms all the others.
The twelfth sign - that genuine grace manifests itself in the practice of Christian virtue over time - is Edwards's most important contribution to the psychology of religion. It responds to the perennial problem of the 'temporary believer': the person who has intense religious experiences and then returns to their former life. Edwards argues that the only reliable evidence of genuine regeneration is a transformed life sustained over time - not the initial intensity of the experience but its long-term fruit in character and conduct.
Critical Reception
The Religious Affections was immediately influential within the Reformed tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, and remained the standard text of evangelical psychology of religion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Charles Finney's revivalist methods, which Edwards would not have endorsed, represented in part a response to the standards Edwards set: Finney sought to produce the fruit that Edwards demanded by directly engineering the emotional conditions.
The twentieth-century revival of Edwards scholarship - particularly the Yale critical edition begun in 1957 - has made the Religious Affections available in the form Edwards wrote it, and subsequent decades have seen it recognized as a psychological masterwork as well as a theological one. William James drew on the tradition Edwards represented in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), acknowledging the importance of the Puritan tradition's analysis of religious experience for his own psychological study.
Theological Significance
The work's theological significance lies in its integration of the Reformed doctrine of grace with a sophisticated empirical psychology of spiritual experience. Edwards demonstrates that the question of genuine versus counterfeit religion is not simply a theological question (which doctrines does one believe?) or a psychological question (which emotional states does one experience?) but a question about the long-term transformation of character and the orientation of the will. This integration anticipates the best of contemporary spiritual formation literature.
Legacy
Edwards's influence on American evangelical spirituality has been enormous and largely invisible: his framework for evaluating religious experience has shaped the evangelical tradition's suspicion of emotional excess and its demand for practical fruit. The 'sanctification debates' of nineteenth-century Holiness and Keswick theology, and the contemporary evangelical discourse about 'genuine conversion' and 'cheap grace,' all work within the framework Edwards established.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with 1 Peter 1:3-9 (joy unspeakable), 1 John 4:7-21 (love as the test of genuine religion), Matthew 7:15-27 (knowing trees by their fruits), Galatians 5:16-26 (the fruit of the Spirit), 2 Peter 1:3-11 (growing in virtue as evidence of election), and 1 Corinthians 13 (love as the greatest gift, without which all other gifts are worthless).
Further Reading
- George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003) - the definitive biography and essential context for the Religious Affections. - John Smith (ed.), Religious Affections (Yale critical edition, 1959) - the standard scholarly text with an invaluable editorial introduction. - Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism (2004) - essential context for Edwards's place in the broader evangelical movement of the eighteenth century.