It's the content

At church this weekend we talked about the tendency to prize presentation over content. I had an interesting experience with it today. I had downloaded an MP3 of a Jonathan Edwards sermon that is related to a project I am working on at ISU on the history of justice and mercy in political theory. It had everything going against it presentation wise. It was nearly two hours long and was being read in a monotone by an older lady speaking into what sounds like a very inexpensive microphone attached to her home computer. In some ways though all of this made it more realistic since from what we know Edwards himself was not particularly dynamic as a speaker. I was listening to it as I rode the bus home from work and got into it. Anastasia was working tonight so I kept listening as I ate dinner, did the laundry and vacuumed. It was powerful. He briefly surveyed the context of his passage, which was Romans 3:19, spent about 20-30 minutes on "doctrine" where he explained his view of justice and deserved punishment and refuted objections, and then he launched into the "practical application" section which was about an hour of telling sinners how infinitely bad their sin is and how numerous their sins are. He just kept going through every area of life and showing how our actions fall short of the glory of God constantly. His goal was for "every mouth to be silenced" as it says in the verse, that is, for us to realize that our punishment would be completely just. Part of what I enjoy about history and authors from different eras is the way they challenge our starting assumptions. It is clear that Edwards works from a different standard of how we determine the deserved punishment for things than we do in our culture today. I think for us the question is "how much damage did you do" while for Edwards it was "how much of an obligation did you have to obey?" I have tried a few times in the past to listen to audio read by the same woman and have never been able to get past the presentation before. Today is the exception to the rule. I need God's help to get better at learning to look past the presentation.