Spending Time with Giants

A friend and I met for lunch today to discuss Jonathan Edwards' Unpublished Essay on the Trinity, written sometime in the 1700s. Edwards' main point was that the Word of God teaches us more things concerning the Trinity than have been generally taken notice of. In in a very compact way he goes higher up and further into this most mysterious of divine mysteries. Among other things this is the best teaching on the Person of the Holy Spirit that I've ever read. And his writing is not dry as dust nor highbrow, but instead is richly devotional.

But the Trinity is not my point in this post. This is a lament against modern books. If you've got a few minutes read just the first 100 words or so of Edward's essay and compare that to the same amount of text in a typical theological work of today. Edwards says vastly more in a few paragraphs than modern authors usually convey in whole books. If you want to discover more glorious and exceedingly wonderful things in your reading, make time for the giants of the past.