Brotherly Wisdom

"Jonathan Edwards, as a defender of the Great Awakening, always insisted that a living spirituality was the one indispensible thing. Yet Edwards also realized how vital it was to struggle toward distinctly Christian views of the world. To him there was no antithesis between heartfelt devotion and the most recondite labors of the mind." -Mark Noll Scandal of the Evangelical Mind p. 77.

You might ask which Brother's Wisdom is this, Jonathan Edwards' or Mark Noll's? History, as little as we like to admit, is always biased. Noll is not offering us an objective account of the demeanor of a Christian figure. He is holding Edwards up as an example of the Evangelical ideal. He even tells us in this quote those specific qualities that make him so venerable. Edwards becomes a vehicle for Noll to communicate the need for Evangelicalism to recapture the vision for critically thinking coupled with hearty devotion.