The humiliation of Christ

'Christ's humiliation was great, in being born in such a low condition, of a poor virgin, and in a stable: his humiliation was great, in being subject to Joseph the carpenter, and Mary his mother, and afterwards living in poverty, so as not to have where to lay his head ...'

The Excellency of Christ, Works, 19, 576.

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Sean Michael Lucas

Sean Michael Lucas, Assistant Professor at Covenant Seminary, reflects here on Edwards and ministerial formation.

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Herman Bavinck

My excuse for this post is that Bavinck cites JE quite a few times in his dogmatics. My real reason is that I think Bavinck is an excellent theologian and these two biographical essays are worth reading. You should, of course, read the translation of his dogmatics, especially volume three. I think that most of Bavinck's understanding of Edwards is mediated through Warfield, Hodge, and particularly the 1907 essay by Jan Ridderbos De Theologie van Jonathan Edwards

Part I

Part II

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van Mastricht

I think he means seventeenth-century theology - but wouldn't this be a marvellous event for the study of JE?

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Jonathan Edwards and Slavery

One of the more thorny issues of Edwards' life and legacy has to do with his position on slavery. It has been long known that Edwards himself owned slaves. More recently, Edwards' defense of slave ownership was judiciously assessed in an excellent article by Ken Minkema in the Massachusetts Historical Review. (Click here to read that article.)

However, it is interesting to note that though Edwards was himself a slaveowner, his direct intellectual descendants including his own son JE Jr. were among the first New England abolitionists. Minkema and Stout wrote a companion piece to the first slavery article in the Journal of American History. (Click here to read that article.)

In recent months, there have emerged a couple of further comments on Edwards and slavery from Sweeney & Guelzo, Chamberlain, Marsden, and Minkema.

It seems to me that this issue was blown wide open by Minkema's two articles listed above, and is ripe for further analysis, especially given that there are estimated to be more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history.

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