Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature

Abstract

T X THROUGHOUT his remarkable career, Jonathan Edwards celebrated coherence and beauty of God's creation. In private notebooks, sermons, and treatises he contemplated what was aimed at or designed in creating of astonishing fabric of universe which we behold. He concluded that God ceaselessly reveals himself alike by his word and and that joy and duty of Christian is to observe and praise this sacred design.1 Eagerly discharging this task, Edwards searched world as well as Bible for signs of God's intent. He read drama of Christ's death and resurrection in cycles of sun, phases of moon, and even in emergence of silkworm from its cocoon. In hand-stitched journal he sometimes titled The Images of Divine Things, sometimes The Language and Lessons of Nature, Edwards recorded over two hundred entries showing how the works of nature are intended and contrived of God to signify ... spiritual things.2 And in thirty sermons that compose A History of Work of Redemption, he traced God's providential design not only in traditional biblical chronicles but also in such events as English Civil War. Though Scripture remained surest guide to holy truths, in documents like these Edwards declared his faith that nature and human history are also legitimate sources of revelation, communicating God's purpose to his saints. Typology was interpretive key to these divine communications; Edwards argued that, properly understood, it could unlock God's intentions in created world and in Scripture. In its narrowest definition,