The Works of Edwards in 2 Volumes

5 Minutes in Church History with Stephen Nichols

Ligonier Ministries

Christianity, History, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Jonathan Edwards’ writings reveal profound insights into theology, philosophy, and the human condition. Today, Stephen Nichols explores the rich content of Edwards’ works and explains why his writings are still relevant to the church today.

Read the transcript: https://ligonier.org/podcasts/5-minutes-in-church-history-with-stephen-nichols/the-works-of-edwards-in-2-volumes/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.
0:10.0	Last week we were visiting with our friend Jonathan Edwards in his first published sermon,
0:15.0	and that got me perusing my shelves and looking at my different volumes, books by Jonathan Edwards, and I landed on
0:23.7	the works of Jonathan Edwards in two volumes published by the Banner of Truth, Trust.
0:29.7	And I remember exactly when I got these books. I was working on my dissertation on Edwards.
0:35.4	I had had a set of these somewhere, and they were missing, and I needed to get
0:41.0	them replaced, and I got them replaced. But there's something that you need to know about this
0:45.8	two-volume set. It's massive. It's a couple thousand pages. It's a lot of words. It's double
0:52.1	column and it its tiny print.
0:54.7	To work through this is quite a feat.
0:57.8	Well, John Gershner used to have this thing that he would do that he would offer, he would
1:04.2	give someone the two-volume set if they agreed to read it, signed a pledge to that effect, and then, in fact, circled back to him
1:15.6	when they were completed and had read it. And they would get a little plate that said as much
1:23.2	and would be put inside the volumes. And I saw one in a library once. It made its way from its
1:29.0	owner to a library. But it's the works of Jonathan Edwards' two volumes. It is full of
1:35.8	Edward's treatises. It is full of Edward's sermons. In fact, last week we were talking about God glorified and man's dependence. Well,
1:46.9	that is the very first thing you bump into when you open volume two is Edwards' first published
1:54.6	sermon. Volume one begins with the memoirs of Jonathan Edwards and gives a little biography of Edwards and even traces out his family tree and his siblings and then also his children and all of the interconnections.
2:13.4	These volumes also have some letters from Jonathan Edwards. They have some of his miscellanies.
2:20.3	We've talked about those before. These were his notebooks of his miscellaneous thoughts, and he
2:26.0	started off labeling them A to Z, and then he went back and did A to ZZ, and then he thought,
2:33.3	this isn't working very well, so he started
	...

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