46, but this should have counted as a couple of books

So I guess I never figured I'd read a Jonathan Edwards book, let alone a book written by John Piper commenting on a book by Jonathan Edwards, which by the way, included the entire Edwards book as well. But, I did, and it was tough. I am decently familiar with Piper so I actually thought the Piper portion of the book was pretty straight-forward. Don't get me wrong, I learned an immense amount of information, but as far as difficulty of comprehension I was pleasantly surprised that I felt like I was in-taking what Piper was attempting to convey. That all ceased when Edward's original writings took over. I need to say that if it were not for the Piper thoughts to lead the book, I don't feel I could have gotten through the remainder of the writings. The text that Edwards wrote was entitled The End for Which God Created the World it is a fairly well known piece of Christian literature, but I found it very hard to track with. This was not beacuse of the content or necessarily even the level of theological understanding. It had much more to do with the changes in the English language over the last 250ish years. Jonathan Edwards was a contemporary of the founding fathers and his writing reads as such. To my "post0modern" sensibilities the words of Edwards came across much like contemporary legal documents. This is not to say that it was intentionally confusing, in fact I often found that Edward's made his point more thoroughly than necessary, the writing just piled up at great lengths causing me to often get tangled up in his ideas, and proof texts. Having said all of these things I felt this was an incredibly valuable read. I was stretched in my understandings of God, and was challenged as a reader. It was fascinating to see that many of the struggles in the modern American Church are similar to those of Edwards day, even though the language of his time is as foreign to me as Greek or Hebrew.