Religious Affections

A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections is a famous publication written in 1746 by Jonathan Edwards describing his philosophy about the process of Christian conversion in Northampton, Massachusetts, during the First Great Awakening, which emanated from Edwards' congregation starting in 1734.[1]

Religious Affections
Original 1746 edition of Religious Affections
AuthorJonathan Edwards
CountryUnited States
SubjectTheology
Publication date
1746

Analysis
Part of a series on
Calvinism
 Calvinism portal

Edwards wrote the Treatise to explain how true religious conversion to Christianity occurs. Edwards describes how emotion and intellect both play a role, but "converting grace" is what causes Christians to "awaken" to see that forgiveness is available to all who have faith that Jesus' sacrifice atones for all sins. This salvation is not possible through believers' imperfect good works which are simply evidence of faith, only through Christ's sacrifice which is free to all. Edwards describes the importance of testing new faith and discerning whether it is legitimate. He lays out twelve tests of true conversion, including ways of measuring allegedly fruitful works.

He basically concludes that the fruit of the Spirit are the religious affections, love being the chief affection, and that all other fruit (or Christian virtues) flow from this. "Love is the chief of the affections, and as it were the fountain of them." (p. 76, Banner of Truth Edition). He further says "for it was not by men's having the gifts of the Spirit (referring to spiritual gifts), but by their having the virtues of the Spirit, that they were called spiritual." (p. 127). This is how you can distinguish between carnal men and spiritual men. Carnal men do not produce the fruit of the Spirit, but spiritual men do. So it was with Christ. "All the virtues of the Lamb of God, His humility, patience, meekness, submission, obedience, love and compassion, are exhibited to our view in a manner the most tending to move our affections of any that can be imagined." (p. 53).

Impact

"Religious Affections" remains popular and modern day evangelists and writers such as Tim Keller and John Piper often refer to this and other Edwards works as models for their ministry.[2]

gollark: Some offense, but it's not like it takes much knowledge and thought about AI to go "hmm, what if hyperadvanced self-learning AI thing". If it was that easy, people would already have done it and probably taken over the world.
gollark: Basically, your simple English description of what you want implicitly assumes a bunch of human knowledge - *specialized expert* human knowledge, even - which would require vast amounts of difficult development to get in an AI.
gollark: Oh, and if it's a paper it might not even come with code or it might be really awful code, yes.
gollark: The code/paper you find isn't going to be conveniently usable by just downloading it and copypasting it into your AI's code or something. You'll probably have to actually understand how it works, yet another unfathomable general intelligence task, figure out how it interfaces with the rest of the code or if it can even be used together at all, and possibly rewrite it entirely to fit with what you need.
gollark: "Pluck it out" is also easy to say, but it's actually even harder.

See also

References
  1. Jonathan Edwards, A treatise concerning religious affections (Dublin: J. Ogle, 1812) (accessed July 26, 2009)
  2. Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton Adult, February 2008) ISBN 0-525-95049-4
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.