God's Grand Design | Reformed Theological Seminary

Jonathan Edwards produced a comprehensive theology of the Christian life that started with God’s glory and ended with all creation returning to that glory. It was a vision that remains quite simply magnificent. And yet it is a theological vision that has not been adequately explored until now.

Professor and pastor Sean Michael Lucas has converted his years of teaching into this valuable overview of Edwards’s theology, exploring both redemption history and the application of God’s redemptive work in the individual. As Lucas unpacks Edwards’s vision in this accessible, two-part framework, the resulting revelation of God’s glorious work will strengthen our understanding of Edwards and of our own Christian life.

Those of us trundling through the complete works of Jonathan Edwards in the recent Yale edition are grateful for experts like Sean Lucas who, with a single lucid paragraph, are able to unravel the most complex of Edwardian thought. The study of Edwards has become something of a ‘rite of passage’ in recent days and some of us have some catching up to do. Dr. Lucas, a well-respected Edwards scholar in his own right, has given us a comprehensive summary of Edwards’s understanding of the Christian life that does for Edwards what Sinclair Ferguson did for John Owen. An essential and most welcome companion to any serious study of Edwards.

Derek W. H. Thomas
John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary

This is an edifying book on a most edifying person, one who became the most important pastor in all of American history. By focusing our attention on what mattered most to Edwards―authentic Christian living that derives from God’s grace and reflects God’s glory―Sean Lucas has written a book that can draw you nearer to God, even make you a better person. Good theology, well presented, leads to passionate, godly piety. Edwards and Lucas know this well. I pray that you will know it too.

Douglas A. Sweeney
Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Sean Michael Lucas analyzes the ways that Jonathan Edwards understood the Christian life as both inconceivably vast and intensely personal and practical, demonstrating that there is still much to be learned from America’s greatest philosopher-theologian. From his Introduction to the two invaluable Appendices, Lucas offers an eminently useful volume that reminds one of much of Edwards’s own writing―technical yet accessible, scholarly yet pastoral.

Richard A. Bailey
Associate Professor of History, Canisius College

It is good for the church―and the heart―to see Sean Lucas, a modern pastor-theologian, working with such depth and clarity in the corpus of Jonathan Edwards, America’s preeminent pastor-theologian. Lucas shows a mastery of the vast secondary and primary sources on and by Edwards, yet writes to be understood and to bless the church. If there is a better way to honor the New Light minister, I am not aware of it.

Owen Strachan
Associate Professor of Christian Theology, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

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God’s Grand Design

The Theological Vision of Jonathan Edwards

By Dr. Sean Lucas

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