Much recent scholarship has appeared to correct the sensationalized misrepresentations of the eminent New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards. Iain H. Murray's highly regarded Jonathan Edwards: A New Biog­raphy and the voluminous publication of the Yale University Press edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, have given the lie to the defamatory image of the Northampton preacher as a man of strictly minatory and denunciatory sermons. We now see Edwards as a man of almost unequalled piety, theological and philosophical penetration, and deep love for Christ and his people.

For Edwards the believer's death is a lovely thing. The presence of death was never very far from the Edwards' home. The rugged conditions of the primitive and largely unsettled western Connecticut River Valley was often cruel to its settlers and inhabitants. Harsh winters, the threat of hostile French Roman Catholic invaders from the North, Indian raids, disease, and even earthquakes made the fragile existence of Northampton and Stock­bridge settlers all the more precarious.

But more immediately, Edwards personally knew the company of death. In February 1729, the Rev Solomon Stoddard, Edwards' maternal grand­father, died. Stoddard, an almost patriarchal figure in colonial New England, was not only a dear relative and friend but a notable influence and remarkable mentor for a young Jonathan Edwards, who assisted him in ministry at Northampton for nearly two years. But there were many other bereavements: His grandmother, Esther Stoddard, died in February 1736; Edwards preached her funeral sermon. Her renowned piety and 'godly conversation' warranted, in Edwards' judgement, preaching from the text of Revelation 14:13, with the doctrine 'When saints depart out of this for another world their works do follow them'. Indeed, in addition to the loss of these eminent saints, Edwards was to endure the loss of a dear friend and confidant, David Brainerd. Brainerd, the twenty-nine-year-old missionary to the Indians of New Jersey, died of tuberculosis in the Edwards' home in October 1747. But before the winter which began with the death of Brainerd was over, Jerusha Edwards, Jonathan Edwards' second eldest daughter, who cared for Brainerd the last twenty weeks of his life, fell fatally ill and, within a week, died in February 1748.

Yet despite the uninvited encroachment of death upon those exceptionally dear to his heart and within his own home, he held a most remarkable perspective on death. While undoubtedly reflecting upon the recent deaths of David and Jerusha, Edwards recorded his thoughts in a notebook entry written in early 1748:

When the fruit is ripe, it is easily gathered. It don't cleave fast to the tree, but is ready to quit it, and is picked without rending or making any wound. So is a saint that is ripe for heaven; he easily quits this world.Job 5:26.

Particularly notable in this appealing entry is the almost casual reference to Job 5:26: 'Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season.' Here Edwards finds that the fright and suffer­ing of death for the saint now becomes a thing as timely and pleasant as matured fruit almost dropping, as it were, into the hands of the gardener, or as a sheaf of grain naturally ripened in its season.

Edwards would not allow there to be any confusing of his thoughts on the pleasant transition of death — death is only a pleasant thing inasmuch as it is the death of a saint. Confident in the effectual work of Christ and the actuat­ing operation of the Holy Spirit, Edwards reflects on the saint's death as in Christ. Solomon Stoddard and his mother Esther were Christians, in Edwards' view, of the most 'eminent' kind. And Brainerd had the full and famous testimony of Edwards' most popular work The Life and Diary of David Brainerd to attest to the grace and mercy bestowed upon him. As for Edwards' own daughter, Jerusha, Iain Murray records that Edwards, in a let­ter to Benjamin Coleman on March 9, 1741, exuberantly noted with the peculiar interest with which only a father could, that the past winter had been a time of the most remarkable heavenly blessing upon his family. The winter past, of course, would have fallen right into the heart of the Great Awakening, and immediately followed George Whitefield's October visit to Northampton, which things, as Edwards indicates, left an indelible gracious impression upon his own family:

All our children that are capable of religious reflections have been under remarkable impressions, and I can't but think that salvation is come into my house, in several instances. I hope that my four eldest children have been savingly wrought upon, the eldest some years ago.

Jerusha would have been the second of the four mentioned.

His pleasant contemplations surrounding the death of a saint are found in numerous entries in his 'Miscellanies' notebooks, yet his fullest depiction is in an early sermon on the text of Philippians 1:21, 'to live is Christ, and to die is gain'. The morning and afternoon pair of sermons from Philippians 1:21 constitute an interesting source of insight into Edwards' thoughts con­cerning Christian life and death from one of his earliest extant sermons (between 1721-23). The sermons, preached at different sessions of the same Sabbath day service, show how death strangely enough operates as the ful­crum of the Christian life and religion.

The morning sermon opens with an ironic juxtaposing of life and death in this world based upon the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Moving from his introductory focus on the Redeemer to humanity, Edwards says that being born in this world 'dead in trespasses and sins' is death unto God, and being naturally dead in sin really consists in living to the devil. Our entrance into this life is really a death, and that death is life unto the devil; so that 'the life that we naturally live to Satan must be destroyed before we are raised again to the spiritual life of Christ'. Edwards explains that life to God in Christ is death to sin and Satan, and this dying to self, sin, and the world is preparatory to our physical death and subsequent entrance into heaven: 

• 'First. The true Christian, before he lives to Christ, dies unto sin.' It is by the grace of repentance that sin receives its deadly wound. Where sin was death, now life (in the grace of repentance) fatally wounds death.

• 'Sec­ondly. The true Christian dies to the world of this sort of death which is necessary in order to (one's) living to Christ.'
  
  The second main point of the sermon shows from what internal principle it is that a true believer lives thus to Christ: 'I answer in one word: Christ himself lives in the soul of a true Christian, and influences and actuates him by his Holy Spirit.' Prior to conversion, sin and inordinate self-love, love of the world and 'fleshly lusts' were the principle of life, but then, by the grace of God, 'Christ enters in their room and makes his abode in the same heart where sin, lust, and the devil formerly dwelt; and he enlivens and actuates the Christian by his Holy Spirit...' This holy principle is contrary to the inclinations towards the things of this world and disposes one toward holi­ness and love for Christ.

• 'Third. He dies to himself ... by dying to ourselves, we mean the morti­fying of that false, inordinate, irregular, mistaken self-love, whereby we seek to please only ourselves and none else, seek our own present pleasure with­out consideration of our future state.' Edwards finds this truth copiously evidenced in Scripture from Matthew 10:39; Luke 14:26; Romans 8:10; Galatians 2:20; 5:24 and other places as well. One is led to conclude that the Christian life of dying to sin, self, and the world makes excellent practice for the coming of physical death. The Christian, then, is one who is to be well versed in the language and exercise of dying — for the expressed purpose of spiritual living.

The afternoon sermon, entitled 'Dying to gain', has for its doctrine 'Death is gain to the true Christian'. The word 'gain', in Edwards' explication, is not simply a matter of proportions or enhanced quality but rather is an 'inesti­mable, inconceivable gain'. If the Christian were to continually dwell upon this world, he would be forever kept from his heavenly inheritance which is his all.

By death the Christian is brought to the actual possession of all his happi­ness, which is nothing other than Christ, the beatific vision, and all the benefits he has procured for his elect saints.

It is all on the other side (of) the grave; this valley must be passed before we can come to it. So that seeing if the believer was to continue always in these earthly animal bodies, he would entirely lose his heavenly treasure, which is all his gain. Therefore, dying and a separation from these taber­nacles, when God thinks it is the fittest and best time that we should, is his gain.

To describe the gainfulness of the death of a believer, Edwards contrasts what is desirable or gained in it with what one may suppose to be an evil or terrible thing in the death of a believer. Starting with what may seem at first something terrible in the death of a saint, he points out that worldly comforts and goods are given to the saints for no other end than to prepare for death: 'and are good for nothing at all else, but only to fit us to leave them'. The illustrations of this point are universal in their application:

Of what use is a staff when one has got to his journey's end? Or suppose one had a whole back-burden of staves for travel with, and (to) help us on our journey. Why should we be unwilling to part with them when we are got home to our own country, to rest forever in our father's house? What a folly it would be, still to desire to carry the burden of them when they do us no good in the world, but only to burden.

Those saints which are ever so easily plucked off the branch of this world find that all worldly good things are given for no other use than to help them forward on their way to heaven. It is the dying to the desire of these things and finding their repose only in the sweet contemplations of the excellencies of Christ which leaves them, as Edwards says, 'ripe' for the gathering. They are within themselves 'ripe' with willingness to ever so easily drop off from this world, and they are so 'ripened' through the sanctifying graces of the Holy Spirit that God may ever so easily gather them as he pleases.

But then, Edwards continues, although the Christian when he dies leaves all worldly things, 'yet he don't lose the good of them; he carries all the good of them out of the world with him into the other'. This curious assertion initially seems inconsistent with previous statements concerning worldly good; that is until Edwards shows that even the memory of the pleasantness of temporal 'good' and relationships has its grounding and fullness in Christ. The Christian, then, acquires the spiritual good out of those things 'that will stick by him forever', because any truly excellent, good, harmonious, or ami­able quality in them ultimately came by the communication of the Holy Spirit. Edwards asks rhetorically, 'Why should the bee regard the flower after he has sucked all the honey out of it?' indicating that the things them­selves are not to be considered worthy of religious adoration, per se, for Christ is to be realized as having been the joy or good or love communicated in them.

The same principle is applied with special nuances when Edwards consid­ers the interpersonal relationships of saints. The apparent loss of friends and relatives, Edwards explains, 'is a far more grievous and melancholy circum­stance of death ... than the parting with profits and honors and sensitive pleasures of the world.' He beautifully explains this point in one of his earli­est 'Miscellanies' entries:

DEATH OF A SAINT. When a saint dies, he has no cause at all to grieve because he leaves his friends and relations that he dearly loves, for he doth not properly leave them. For he enjoys them still in Christ; because eve­rything that he loves in them and loves them for, is in Christ in an infinite degree; whether it be nearness of relation, or any perfection and good received, or love to us, or a likeness in dispositions, or whatever is a rational ground of love.

At death, the believer must necessarily leave his friends and relations, but whatever the degree of love within those relationships, they are altogether swallowed up as mere vessels within the heavenly ocean of love the saint enjoys through his union with Christ.

He leaves the persons, 'tis true, but he don't leave the relation, for he en­joys them all in God. Should you be by death separated from your husband or wife, know ye not that ye are espoused to Jesus Christ? You shall not only find all your relations completed and made up in Jesus Christ, but shall become related (to) the whole triumphant and glorious family of God. You shall leave a few friends to go to the employment of thousands nearer, dearer, and far more excellent than any upon earth.

Whatever qualities of love we enjoy within a relationship here, Edwards is saying, is purified and magnified to an infinite degree in Christ, that all other relationships are reputed as nothing. But the goodness of the Lord even includes a purified and intensified love between ourselves and others sancti­fied by God:

And besides all this, you don't leave your friends forever; that is, not any of those that are truly excellent and desirable, whom God hath sanctified and made holy, and so worthy to be the objects of your love in the other world; them you shall meet again in glory. You shall meet them in heaven and at the resurrection of the just, and shall never part more.

Next, Edwards grandly delineates the advantages of a true Christian's death:

• First. At death all the troubles and afflictions of a true Christian are come to an eternal end ... This is the first thing that is gained by it: a full and perfect deliverance from affliction, and that eternally.

• Second. The second thing is a perfect and eternal freedom from sin as the body is put off and all remainders of sin are put off with it, and the soul ascends into the pure hands of its maker...

• Third. Death is a perfect freedom from all temptation. The devil endeav­ours with all his might to disturb the peace and calm of a believing soul, and interrupt its spiritual pleasures by the injections of hellish temptations and devilish suggestions, and so the Christian is very frequently afflicted with this grand adversary. But death puts him out of reach; he, like his great Lord Jesus Christ, triumphs over the devil by dying.

• Fourth. At death the believer not only gains a perfect and eternal deliver­ance from sin and temptation, but is adorned with a perfect and glorious holiness. The work of sanctification is then completed, and the beautiful image of God has then its finishing strokes by the pencil of God, and begins to shine forth with a heavenly beauty like a seraphim.

• Fifth. By death the true believer is brought to the possession of all those heavenly riches, honors, and glorious pleasures that were laid up by Christ for him. Being this made gloriously beautiful, with perfect holiness, he is embraced in the arms of his glorified Redeemer and is conducted to the infinite treasure that was laid up for him...

• Sixth. And lastly, the death of a Christian is in order to a more glorious resurrection.

'APPLICATION' or 'USE' is the third and final section of the sermon. The thrust of the exhortation is based on the axiom 'All must undergo death'. The contrast between the saint and the sinner is fully manifest in the sermon 'USE' as Edwards leaves the lovely descriptions of the heavenly gain of the saint at death and plainly sets forth the reality of eternal spiritual destruction.

One leaves all his temptations forever, but the other instead of that falls into the hands of the tempter, not to be tempted but to be tormented by him. The one is perfectly delivered from all remainders of corruption; the other he carries all that vast load of sin, made up of original sin, natural corruption, and actual sins, into hell with him, and there the guilt of them breaks forth in the conscience and burns and scorches him as flames of hell within.

Death to the true Christian is an entrance into eternal pleasures and unspeakable joys, and for this reason Edwards can joyfully contemplate even the death of the dearest of friends or the nearest of relations. But the death of a sinner is an altogether different matter; his death is an entrance into never-ending miseries. This world is all the hell that ever a true Christian is to endure, and it is all the heaven that unbelievers shall ever enjoy.

At death, the sinner leaves all his honor and enters into eternal disgrace; but the Christian is then invested with his.