Caution: The Dangers of Reading "Charity and Its Fruits"

Do you like reading classics?

If so, you'll be happy to know that Charity and Its Fruits by Jonathan Edwards is now available for the first time ever in one unabridged volume. Editor Kyle Strobel has also provided introductions, definitions, and notes to make it a bit more accessible for modern readers.

John Piper writes enthusiastically about this volume:

“I am thrilled that Kyle Strobel has edited this new edition of Edwards’s Charity and Its Fruits. This series of sermons holds a special place in my affections for Edwards for three reasons. First, in Munich, Germany, my wife and I read it aloud to each other in 1972. What a way to build a young marriage! Second, Edwards’s treatment of ‘Charity seeketh not her own’ profoundly shaped my emerging Christian Hedonism. Third, the last chapter, ‘Heaven Is a World of Love,’ is simply unsurpassed in its power to make me want to go there. I am unabashed in my love for Jonathan Edwards—and the grandeur of his God. May God give him an ever-wider voice.”

Caution.

Strobel warns readers of two very real dangers in reading Charity and Its Fruits.

The temptation to read this book simply because it should be read. Maybe this book appears on your must read list or on your books you are embarrassed to admit you have not read list. You read, then, not out of a desire to know God more, but out of a desire to have conquered the “right” books. This is a temptation of self-aggrandizement, to be “in the know” in all the respectable ways. It is born, typically, out of a desire to be seen in a certain light, to be lauded for historical, theological, and spiritual depth. When reading with this set of lenses, one’s mind gathers interesting tidbits of information, but often fails to hear a truly prophetic call against one’s own life, heart, or beliefs. Someone not open to this kind of prophetic call will relegate it to the backseat or jettison it completely. Vice itself gets puffed up by the very exercise that should help deflate it.
Instead of reading to judge your own heart, you might read all too readily to bring judgment on others. As a subconscious attempt at self-protection, pride often asserts itself by pointing out the failures of others rather than facing the reality of one’s own sin. Pastors, particularly, may struggle with this temptation, thinking of congregants or the church at large, rather than themselves as they read material that may hit uncomfortably close to home. This temptation arises from a broader vice, which is a failure to know oneself truly. As will be seen throughout Charity and Its Fruits, knowing your own heart is tied together with knowing God and grasping the reality of the Christian life. Those who do not know themselves may balk at Edwards’s detailed depictions of pride, envy, selfishness, anger, and the like, failing to recognize how these very vices blind them to their own hearts.

Charity and Its Fruits

Jonathan Edwards, Kyle Strobel

A classic, unabridged work by Jonathan Edwards on 1 Corinthians 13—made accessible via annotations, definitions, and callouts written by Edwards scholar Kyle Strobel.

So how should you read Charity and Its Fruits?:

I suggest reading this volume in a truly devotional manner. It would be much more fruitful to ponder the text prayerfully than to rush through it. Edwards will, without question, cause you to shift uncomfortably in your chair. Rather than moving on to escape your discomfort, turn to prayer. The matters Edwards explores are, I suggest, the very areas God may want to expose in you. Allow Edwards to reveal the reality of your heart, but don’t stop with self-knowledge alone. Use these opportunities to rest in the grace of God and avail yourself of the power of his love alone to remedy the death that resides within you.