Jonathan Edwards

The first thing that I started to think about with this document was the way it was arranged for the reader. I enjoyed the beginning lead in to Edwards main argument. After reading through it multiple times I really started to comprehend what Edwards was trying to argue. The beginning of the passage started to tell a story about the light that spread from God to Peter. It speaks of how peter is “truly blessed” because he has received a spiritual light from God and pronounced that Christ was in fact the son of God. From there it started to go into Edwards’s doctrine.
One of the introductory paragraphs that immediately gained my attention was the section when Edwards spoke of how “it was not flesh and blood that had revealed it to him, but God.” After that sentence it goes on to talk about how the message given to Peter is truly special and unique and unnatural. For if it were natural and could be spoken by all men, then surely someone like a priest or anyone in high society would know God’s information before a peasant or of the like. This idea is continually brought up later in the doctrine and is the foundation that Edwards is trying to argue.
The part of the argument that I studied closely was the section on imagination in relation to spiritual light. This really interested me because I often wondered who are the so called “chosen ones” and if they can prove their claim. Many people take impressions and turn them into a spiritual light. I do not believe that it is necessarily a bad thing to “trick” yourself into believing and trying something new, but it is not a message directly from God. “The spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made upon the imagination.” This passage goes onto discuss the light as an unseen blessing. A person cannot see this light or view these messages, nor are the messages life changing. Edwards argues that messages are sent through the light and may bring inspiration that could cause a person to have an epiphany.