Charity and Its Fruits

Christian Love as Manifested In the Heart and Life.

Few Christian leaders since the Reformation have been as gifted as Jonathan Edwards. A man of intense personal devotion to Christ, he was a leader of revival, and a creative Reformed theologian as well as being a missionary and a philosopher fully meriting Hugh MartinÉs description of him as Èthe greatest of metaphysical divines.
Yet it is likely that he would have preferred to
be remembered simply as Èpastor of the Church of Northampton.
Preached in 1783 (the same year that Edwards published.
A Narrative of Surprising
Conversions
Charity and its Fruits gives us an insight into his
regular pulpit ministry in the years between the Northampton revival of 1735
and the Èthe Great AwakeningÉ of 1740.
Entirely free from sentimentality
this moving exposition of 1 Corinthians 13, like the better
known
Religious Affections reveals Edwards insistence both that true Christian experience is supernaturalÉ Í Spirit-produced and Christ-Center Í and that Èall true Christians grace tends to practice. These sermons show how it is possible to steer between Arminianism on the one hand and Antinomianism on the other. The concluding chapter on heaven as a world of love is perhaps the most beautiful in all Edwards' writings.