Edwards on Home, Church, and Fatherhood

During my sabbatical I was concentrating on 2 different but related projects. The first was a study of the relationship between being a father in the home, and a father in the church (i.e. being a pastor). The second was a study of Jonathan Edwards and the importance and centrality of what he called the “practical knowledge” of the Christian. Let me give a bit of background on that. Edwards distinguished between two types of Christian knowledge: speculative knowledge which consists of the mind’s knowledge and understanding of Scripture and what it teaches. The second was practical knowledge which was a love and attraction to God and holiness and a conviction that the gospel is true. This practical knowledge is given directly from God and is what brings about the transformation of the believer.

In my reading of Edwards for this second project, I came across three quotes that addressed the issue of the relationship between being a father in the home and a father in the church. In these quotes, Edwards talks about the home being a “little church.” The quotes are all from the Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. The first number is the volume in that series, the second is the page number in that volume.

That lay persons ought not to exhort one another as clothed with authority is a general rule, but it can’t justly be supposed to extend to heads of families in their own families. Every Christian family is a little church, and the heads of it are its authoritative teachers and governors. Nor can it extend to schoolmasters among his scholars; and some other cases might perhaps be mentioned that ordinary discretion will distinguish, where a man’s circumstances do properly clothe him with authority, and render it fit and suitable for him to counsel and admonish others in an authoritative manner. 4:487.

By parents bringing up their children for Christ. If persons have no other opportunity, yet they have opportunities in their own families that they have the government and the instruction of, of doing a great deal for Jesus Christ. And indeed, heads of families have the greatest opportunity and are under the greatest advantages with respect to them that are under their roof of anybody whatsoever. A Christian family is as it were a little church and commonwealth by itself, and the head of the family has more advantage in his little community to promote religion than ministers have in congregation, and magistrates in the commonwealth, they being always with them and having them at continual command, and having always opportunities of instructing them. If parents did what they might do this way, multitudes of souls might be saved by their means, and a great increase and addition might be made to the kingdom of Jesus Christ: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). 10:577.

We have had great disputes how the church ought to be regulated; and indeed the subject of these disputes was of great importance: but the due regulation of your families is of no less, and in some respects, of much greater importance. Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules. And family education and order are some of the chief of the means of grace. If these fail, all other means are like to prove ineffectual. If these are duly maintained, all the means of grace will be like to prosper and be successful. 25:484.

These quotes seem to confirm that Edwards shared my theory that the church is patterned after the family. He also confirms my thoughts on discipleship and spiritual formation being relational in that he states that parents are under greater advantages to teach as their family is always with them. JE goes so far as the say that family education is one of the chief means of grace. As such parents are the primary teachers of practical knowledge to their children.

I welcome my readers’ thoughts and comments on this.