I’m not much on making resolutions, probably because my track record on keeping them is pretty spotty. An 18th Century theologian named Jonathan Edwards, yes that one (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God), had a go at it on August 17, 1723, and couldn’t stop until he listed 70 resolutions that he vowed to review once a week.

My blogging friend Toby Brown suggests that some of these resolutions would be quite appropriate for bloggers of all stripes.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

What Jonathan Edwards might say to those who blog

In my devotional reading I ran across these selected resolutions of the young Jonathan Edwards. I think they have much to teach those of us who live in the digital age:

8. Resolved, to act, in all respects, both speaking and doing, as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins, or had the same infirmities or failings as others; and that I will let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins and misery to God.

12. Resolved, if I take delight in it as a gratification of pride, or vanity, or on any such account, immediately to throw it by.

15. Resolved, never to suffer the least motions of anger towards irrational beings.

21. Resolved, never to do any thing, which if I should see in another, I should count a just occasion to despise him for, or to think any way the more meanly of him.

(Resolutions 1 through 21 written in one setting in New Haven in 1722)

All bloggers will take these resolutions to heart when pigs fly, says I, but that doesn’t mean that I should not take them to heart. And not only while blogging.

Dave, who tends to be a tad cynical about some things.