How Jonathan Edwards Wrote Books

Jonathan Edwards spent many hours with a quill pen in his hand writing books, sermons, and more. Today, Dr. Stephen Nichols takes us behind the scenes to explore the writing process of this prolific theologian.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are returning to one of our longtime friends, Jonathan Edwards. We all know that Jonathan Edwards wrote many books, and we love those books, Religious Affections, the sermon series Charity and Its Fruits on First Corinthians 13, probably my favorite work of Edwards, A History of The Work of Redemption, again, a sermon series. There’s also his philosophical treatises, Freedom of The Will, Original Sin, The End for Which God Created the World, and of course, The Nature of True Virtue. Well, again, we know Edwards wrote books, but how did he write these books? It’s a fascinating subject. Let’s dig in.

First, we need to mention this, Edwards used paper and a quill pen and ink. It’s no easy feat writing with a quill pen and ink. And when you consider the sheer volume of words and sentences and pages that Edwards wrote, it is nothing short of amazing. Well, Edwards’ writing style was this, thought and thought and more thought, and then writing and writing and more writing. And along with the writing comes editing. And then he was ready to take those ideas out into the public and communicate them as sermons and then as books. A lot of this thought and thought and writing and writing, comes to us in a series of volumes of Edwards called the “Miscellanies.” This project started with Edwards numbering ideas or lettering them, actually, from A to Z, then AA to ZZ. He knew that wasn’t working out anymore, so he started numbering them. By the time he was done, he had 1,360. Add in the 52 for the first runs through the alphabet, and we’ve got 1,412 miscellaneous thoughts. Some of these are only a paragraph long. The longest one runs 40 pages.

In addition to his “Miscellanies” notebooks, he had his blank Bible, which he called his “Miscellaneous Observations on Scripture.” It has over 5,000 notes in it. Additionally, there is his notes on Scripture, which has another thousand plus notes in it, and he has a number of notebooks that pull out a particular subject with, you guessed it, more and more miscellanies. These are on all sorts of subjects on philosophy, on his thoughts after reading Isaac Newton on Opticks. His wonderful notebook is included in this, Images of Divine Things. Well, this material, which takes up no less than 10 volumes in the Yale series on the works of Jonathan Edwards, is all of the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting that Edwards put in, that then resulted in the sermons and in the books. Let’s go back to that very first miscellany of Jonathan Edwards. It is actually on a great subject. It is on the subject of holiness.

Edwards writes, “Holiness is the most beautiful and lovely thing. We drink in strange notions of holiness from our childhood, as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour and unpleasant thing; but there is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. It is the highest beauty and amiableness, vastly above all other beauties. It is a divine beauty, it makes the soul heavenly and far purer than anything here on earth; this world is like mire and filth and defilement to that soul which is sanctified. It is of sweet, pleasant, charming, lovely, amiable, delightful, serene, calm and still nature. It is almost too high a beauty for any creatures to be adorned with; it makes the soul a little, sweet and delightful image of the blessed Jehovah.” That’s Jonathan Edwards on holiness and it’s just one of these, again, close to 10,000 miscellaneous observations that Edwards would write out, and then he would make public for his congregation at Northampton and other congregations and even down to the present day for those of us who enjoy his books.

So, do you want to write like Jonathan Edwards? No problem. Just start with writing out about 10,000 miscellanies, and you’ll be on your way. Well, that is how Jonathan Edwards wrote his books, and I’m Stephen Nichols, and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.