Justin Taylor writes, “If George Marsden only had 45 minutes to talk about Jonathan Edwards, what would he say? He answers that in the following lecture (November 3, 2010) for the Jonathan Edwards Center and the Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Here’s an abstract:

What are the most helpful insights that we can gain from Jonathan Edwards’s theology today? This lecture uses the contrast between Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century to reflect on some of the most characteristic traits of later American culture to which Edwards’s ‘theology of active beauty’ provides particularly helpful alternatives.

Professor Marsden is the author of the magisterial biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003) and A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Eerdmans, 2008), which is a shorter and fresh retelling, not an abridgment. I highly recommend both books. Most recently Dr. Marsden has written the foreword for Dane Ortlund’s Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God (forthcoming from Crossway in August 2014).

The lecture (found at this link) begins around the 4:00 mark and goes until around 50:00, and then Colin Smith (of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church) offers a response. Then for the final 20 minutes there is some Q&A.”