Thursday 21 June 2012

Review of THE END OF THE WICKED CONTEMPLATED BY THE RIGHTEOUS by Jonathan Edwards (Amazon Digital Services, 2011)



Won’t the presence of the damned rotting in Hell spoil Heaven for the saints? To this, legendary Calvinist preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards answers emphatically, No! Taking his cue from Revelation 18:20 (“Rejoice over her thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.”), Edwards argues that the suffering of the hellish majority will not subtract from the pleasure of the heavenly minority; rather, it will—indeed it must—add to it. And so, with demonic relish, he paints the scene: monoemotive saints—capable of feeling only orgiastic joy—sing praises as they witness the judgment of Hell’s new tenants, those objects of God’s insatiable wrath. Devils rend flesh; Jesus mocks; the saints sing on. To children Edwards issues this terrible threat: “How will you bear to see your parents, who in this life had so dear an affection for you, now without any love for you, approving the sentence of condemnation, when Christ shall with indignation bid you depart, wretched, cursed creatures, into eternal burnings?” Quite simply, the choice is this: watch a never-ending snuff movie or act in it. It’s a dark vision from the mind of America’s premier purveyor of Puritan torture porn.

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