The Religious Affections of Jonathan Edwards is arguably the most profound analysis of true conversion in any single work outside of Scripture. It must also be ranked very high among the classics that contrast true versus false religion. Written in 1746, its historic setting was in the shadows of the two seasons of revival that had swept through places like Northampton, Massachusetts where Edwards had pastored up until then. Not everyone at the time was enamored by the Great Awakening. It was necessary to take a kind of middle ground: a “fighting on the two fronts.” 

On the one side was the New England establishment clergy, who he wrote, “are for discarding all religious affections, as having nothing solid or substantial in them.” Their two basic criticisms were that the affections in the revival were of the wrong temper of mind leading to error, and that they soon came to nothing. On the other side were the “Enthusiasts,” who measured spirituality by the intensity of the outward display. This extreme failed to consider either the source or the nature of the affections. Behind these two battlefronts, Edwards also detected a strategy of Satan, saying, “It is no new thing, that much false religion should prevail, at a time of great revival.” A defense of the right balance was imperative. 

This review of Edwards’ classic will be divided into five sections: (1) the structure and argument of the work; (2) The Religious Affections as psychology; (3) conversion and religion in the false signs; (4) conversion and religion in the true signs; and (5) some concluding remarks of application for the church today. By the pair “conversion and religion” I mean only to extend Edwards’ same principles from the internal life to the external world.  

Structure and Argument of the Work

Edwards sets forth his argument in three main sections. The first section is “Concerning the nature of the affections, and their importance in religion.” The second is, “Showing what are no certain signs that religious affections are truly gracious, or that they are not.” Finally, the third is, “Showing what are distinguishing signs of truly gracious and holy affections.”

While this book was more than a mere polemical exercise—Edwards himself seemed always to be investigating such phenomena as a scientist would the objects of nature—there are underlying logical threads and particular methods of argumentation that we need to understand. We might ask, for example, how Edwards uses Scripture texts in this study. In fact he opens off with one, as Puritans so often did. It was 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.” He proceeds from this to show how the affections are exalted throughout the Scriptures.

What forms of argument does Edwards employ thereafter? He makes use of inferences from a combination of psychological and religious premises. For instance: Affections are “the spring of actions.” Thus if true religion is practical action, it follows that the affections are a necessary condition to true religion. He also makes prolific use of inferences from the gospel and the practical Christian life, not to mention analogy, illustration, definition, and example.

All of this serves the main thread coming out of section one and forming the shape of sections two and three: namely, that we should neither praise nor blame affections, but rather distinguish between the true and false. What follows from this, by way of application, is that we ought to be ashamed before God that we are not so affected by the great things of religion. God has given us affections for the same reason as he gave the other faculties, to serve man’s chief end.

The Religious Affections as Psychology

In our contemporary discussions of intellect, affections, and will, we are impoverished to the degree that we do not avail ourselves of the Edwardsian definitions of these aspects of the soul. Informal though they may be, such definitions show a sophistication that has been lacking ever since. Now we must first insist that Edwards was not speaking of “faculties” in any sense that compromised the unity of the soul. Quite to the contrary, these definitions will safeguard that unity. Generally speaking, he saw the soul as possessing two faculties: understanding and inclination, or what we might alternately call mind and will. It may help to know that elsewhere he calls the will, “That by which the mind chooses any thing.”

The first shot fired is at what the New England establishment may have considered as the very strength of their fortress: the calm and composed reason. Edwards takes their assumptions off guard in maintaining that the mind, and not the body, is the proper seat of the affections. From a polemical perspective, what does this accomplish? It eliminates the reduction of affections to the enthusiasts’ bodily gestures or even to the intensity of inward passions. It demands that where one would be rational, one must for that very reason be greatly affected.

One more basic definition is required. “The affections are no other, than the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul … not two faculties; the affections are not essentially distinct from the will, nor do they differ from the mere actings of the will and inclination, but only in the liveliness and sensibility of exercise.” Today we use words like “emotions” or “passions” or “feelings” as rough synonyms. However, for Edwards, affections belong more properly to the rational inclinations, whereas passions are 1. more violent like the animal spirits and 2. seize more control over the mind, rather than flowing from it. Those bodily fluids may “accompany” the affections, but are not of the essence of them.

What are the implications of these basic definitions? The first implication is the primacy of the intellect. Here Edwards would have been at one with Turretin or even with Aquinas. But how does this relate directly to the thesis? The answer is that the mind is not autonomous. It has a proper object beyond itself: “Hence it follows, that wherever true religion is, there are vigorous exercises of the inclination and will towards divine objects.” Nor is such a correspondence between thought and greatest objects of thought a lifeless relationship, as, “There is a sensation of the mind which loves and rejoices, antecedent to any effects of the fluids of the body; and therefore, does not depend on these motions in the body, and so may be in the soul without the body.” The next step of the argument is crucial. There is a necessary and direct relationship between the highest thoughts of God and the deepest affections. If the affections are the livelier of the inclinations, and if it is more rational to approve or disapprove in proportion to the greatness of the object, then those thoughts most proportioned to the excellent greatness of God will issue forth into affections to that same extension of proportions. 

From this flows the imagery of light and heat. “If the great things of religion are rightly understood, they will affect the heart. The reason why men are not affected by such infinitely great, important, glorious, and wonderful things, and they often hear and read about in the word of God, is, undoubtedly, because they are blind.” Not only are head and heart connected in this way, but so is the body as a consequence. This is because of what he calls the “laws of the union of soul and body.” Indeed, there has never been “any lively and vigorous exercise of the inclination, without some effect upon the body, in some alteration of the motion of its fluids, and especially of the animal spirits.” We must note his logic here. He is not putting these bodily expressions either ahead of, nor even parallel to, the thoughts or affections. Rather, he is allowing the nature of this “union” as far as it goes. External activity is not the standard, but neither was it the culprit in the revival’s excesses.

By what standard, then, may we judge the bodily expressions as more or less spiritual? We will come to that in examining those true and false signs. As a matter of psychology, we can at least say that those methods are manipulative that point the affections either to what is false, or (which is a species of the same) to a disproportionate response to the truth declared. So in mere animal spirits, there is a false relation between heart and situation. But as a set of general rules, “No light in the understanding is good, which does not produce holy affection in the heart; no habit or principle in the heart is good, which has no such exercise; and no external fruit is good, which does not proceed from such exercises.”