A Review offered by Samuel T. Logan Jr., Ph.D.: Matthew V. Everhard, A Theology of Joy: Jonathan Edwards and Eternal Happiness in the Holy Trinity. Middletown, DE: JESociety Press, 2018. Pp. 235 $18.00, paper.

Is God angry with me? Or does God love me? Which is it?

Good and fair questions, often asked by many of us – sometimes publicly, often privately.

And almost as often, answered in ways which frequently miss the fundamental point and goal of the teachings of that primary source in our information about God – the Bible.

One of the Christian leaders whose life’s ministry and publications focused on just these questions was the 18^th century New England pastor and theologian, Jonathan Edwards.  But unfortunately, the title given to his most famous sermon has all too often been misunderstood in ways that go directly contrary to what he actually intended to teach.  We know that sermon as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  An ANGRY God?  What possible hope could sinners have if God is ANGRY with us?

As it turns out, we may have incredible hope and even JOY, and the reasons are superbly described in Matthew Everhard’s book.   

Everhard is the senior pastor of Gospel Fellowship Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Valencia, Pennsylvania; he has studied the theology of Edwards for years; and he has written this book  to demonstrate (successfully in this reviewer’s opinion) how and why the author of  “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God” SHOULD BE known as a “theologian of joy and happiness.”   

Rev. Everhard’s first chapter is entitled, quite appropriately, “Joy According to Scripture,” and I will mention just a couple of the points he makes (quite powerfully!). First, “A simple word search for the term ‘joy’ in English returns 203 results in the English Standard version of the Bible, spread out evenly between the testaments: the OT accounting for 141 uses and the NT for 62 occurrences” (p. 18). But beyond the actual appearances of the English word “joy,” Everhard points out that, in terms of the idea behind that simple English word, as Vine’s Concise Dictionary of Bible Words states it, “”the NT . . . contains a variety of words for ‘joy’ which occur a total of 326 times’” (p. 21).

Further, the concept denoted by the English word “joy” appears in what would seem to be incongruous places:  “James begins his general epistle by reminding the believers to ‘count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know  that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness’” (James 1:2, ESV).  Everhard then quote Kittel as follows: “’The point is that this joy is not just preliminary joy.  It is a reference to the future experienced as joy in the present’” (p.23). 

There follows careful exegesis of numerous New Testament passages such as Galatians 5:22, John 15 – 17, and pre-eminently, I Peter 1: 8 – 9, which Edwards exegetes in his masterwork, A Treatise on Religious Affections.   

One of the most important sections of the book is that which Everhard has entitled “Distinguishing Between True Joy and False Joy.”  Here is part of that discussion:

Like all good revival preachers, Edwards could blast away at sins like drunkenness and sexual immorality.  But one of the things that is so masterful in Jonathan Edwards is that he recognizes many other types of false joy besides those which according to Paul are “evident” or obvious.  Edwards is keen to point out the less obvious joy of religious hypocrisy for instance.  Not only in the Religious Affections, but also in other places he speaks of the danger of taking either pride or a false delight in one’s religious experience or self-centered piety.

And Edwards is not reticent about applying his perspective to some perceptions of that other great 18^th century American Great Awakening preacher, George Whitefield.

After George Whitefield came through Northampton in 1740, Edwards became concerned that his congregation would take a misdirected joy in the eloquence and flair of the great dramatic evangelist from England, rather than in the content of his sermons.  In a not-so-subtle way, he warned his congregation about misplaced religious joys  in a sermon series on the “Parable of the Sower and the Seed (Matthew 13: 3 – 7). In this series, he reminded his people that sometimes the seed of the Word of God bears immediate and visible growth, only to then fail to produce lasting fruit.  He told his people, “There are many of you, I doubt not, but have had joy in hearing the word preached.  You have felt well under the preaching of it, and, it may be sometimes have been so moved that the tears have flowed freely.” Here, Edwards makes a thinly veiled reference to Whitefield’s power of elocution.  But then he immediately exhorts his people to press further to discern what kind of happiness this may be: “Examine and try whether or not you joy has only been that sort of joy that is in the stony-ground hearers. Has it not been more a delight in the manner of preaching, than a rejoicing in the thing preached?”  [Emphasis added].

In this specific “Great Awakening context,” Everhard makes comments which sound remarkably like one of Westminster’s own homiletics professors, Edmund Clowney.

In other words, hypocrites “love” God, and by extension good gospel preaching, only because it makes them feel as though they were quite lovely and redeemable in and of themselves.  What they love about the gospel, is what it says about the lengths that God has gone to save them. . . . But by way of contrast, “the saints joy is in God. Indeed, they rejoice at their interest in God, and that Christ is theirs . . . [But] This is not the first spring of their joy; they first rejoice in God as excellent and glorious in himself, and then, secondarily, rejoice in that this glorious God is theirs.”            

As glorious as this sermon was, and as significantly as it was used by God in the Great Awakening, it does not present a complete portrayal of God’s holy nature.  Edwards did not mean for it to do so.  . . . Legalism, moralism, and other graceless conceptions of Christianity do more to conceal, rather than to reveal, the God of joy that Edwards preached by failing to positively state the eternal happiness in which the Three Persons of the Trinity have in one another, and which this one God purposes to reveal to the world through the offer of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.    

However, it must be said that “legalism,” “moralism,” and “graceless conceptions of Christianity” must not be completely neglected because, though they may do more to conceal than to reveal the full truth about the God of Scripture, they do reveal SOME truth contained in “God’s Inerrant Word.”  The greatest weakness of Everhard’s book is that it does not deal in any significant way with some of the issues which Edwards MIShandled (at least in this reviewer’s opinion).  Therefore, some readers (of both Edwards and Everhard) could be led to repeat those MIShandlings.

I have in mind two specific matters: 1) Edwards’ attitude toward slavery and 2) his response to  “the Communion controversy.” Everhard does mention these matters very briefly in a 2-page section of “Critiques” toward the end of the book. Of course, other scholars have focused great attention on these issues but any work on Edwards must deal more fully with them if that work is to be regarded as a full picture of Edwards’ thought and ministry.             

However, Everhard’s conclusion to his book does a superb job both of summarizing the book and of capturing the fundamental reason why all Christians should invest extensive time both in the works of Jonathan Edwards and in this book about those works.  That is, readers should do this if they are really interested in what Everhard says at the very end:

In a way, reading Jonathan Edwards’s works is like reading an extended commentary on the first answer of the Shorter Catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. . .” Better than any other writer I have studied, Edwards has shown me how these two great truths (God’s glory and man’s joy) can emerge as one, rather than repelling each other like the opposite ends of a magnet. 

Samuel T. Logan Jr., Ph.D., is the former International Director of the World Reformed Fellowship. Also former Professor of Church History; President; and Chancellor of Westminster Theological Seminary (PA).