Edwards: a Couple of Brilliant Bits

Marsden quotes Edwards on original sin:

"One might think of it, Edwards suggested in a long note, as though 'Adam and all his posterity had coexisted.' and had been constituted by God as one complex person, as a tree is connected to its root or as the members of the body are connected to the head" (455).

God's plan to share happiness with creation, Marsden paraphrasing & quoting Edwards:

"The happiness of humans, then, when rightly understood, is not an ultimate end of creation in any way apart from God and God's glory. 'The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back to the original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair.'

That last sentence encapsulated the central premise of his entire thought. It is as though the universe is an explosion of God's glory. Perfect goodness, beauty, and love radiate from God and draw creatures to ever increasing share in the Godhead's joy and delight. 'God's respect to the creature's good, and his respect to himself,' Edwards explained, 'is not divided respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at is happiness in union with himself.... The more happiness the greater union: when the happiness is perfect, the union will be perfect. And as the happiness will be increasing to eternity, the union will become more and more strict and perfect; nearer and more like to that between the Father and the Son.' The ultimate end of creation, then, is union in love between God and loving creatures. Because eternity is infinite, this union between God and the saints can be ever increasing, like a line ascending toward and infinite height but never reaching it. So the saints' happiness will continually increase as they are drawn ever closer toward perfect union with God" (463).

Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 

ellipsis above is Marsden's

Who said it?

Yes, it can be googled. But what's the fun in that?

“The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who makes himself God. And what happened? ...The attention of our council has been absorbed by the discovery of human needs (and these needs grow in proportion to the greatness which the son of the earth claims for himself). But we call upon those who term themselves modern humanists, and who have renounced the transcendent value of the highest realities, to give the council credit at least for one quality and to recognize our own new type of humanism: we, too, in fact, we more than any others, honor mankind.

“The Catholic religion is for mankind. In a certain sense it is the life of mankind. It is so by the extremely precise and sublime interpretation that our religion gives of humanity (surely man by himself is a mystery to himself) and gives this interpretation in virtue of its knowledge of God: a knowledge of God is a prerequisite for a knowledge of man as he really is, in all his fullness; for proof of this, let it suffice for now to recall the ardent expression of St. Catherine of Siena, ‘In your nature, Eternal God, I shall know my own.’ The Catholic religion is man’s life because it determines life’s nature and destiny; it gives life its real meaning, it establishes the supreme law of life and infuses it with that mysterious activity which we may say divinizes it.

“We can and must recognize in Christ’s countenance the countenance of our heavenly Father–‘He who sees me,’ Our Lord said, ‘sees also the Father’ (Jn 14:9); our humanism becomes Christianity, and our Christianity becomes centered on God. We may say, to put it differently: a knowledge of man is a prerequisite for a knowledge of God.”