Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (born October 5, 1703, East Windsor, Connecticut [U.S.]—died March 22, 1758, Princeton, New Jersey) was the greatest theologian and philosopher of British American Puritanism, stimulator of the religious revival known as the “Great Awakening,” and one of the forerunners of the age of Protestant missionary expansion in the 19th century.

Early life and ministry

Edwards’s father, Timothy, was pastor of the church at East Windsor, Connecticut; his mother, Esther, was a daughter of Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts. Jonathan was the fifth child and only son among 11 children; he grew up in an atmosphere of Puritan piety, affection, and learning. After a rigorous schooling at home, he entered Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of 13. He was graduated in 1720 but remained at New Haven for two years, studying divinity. After a brief New York pastorate (1722–23), he received the M.A. degree in 1723; during most of 1724–26 he was a tutor at Yale. In 1727 he became his grandfather’s colleague at Northampton. In the same year, he married Sarah Pierrepont, who combined a deep, often ecstatic, piety with personal winsomeness and practical good sense. To them were born 11 children.

The manuscripts that survive from his student days exhibit Edwards’s remarkable powers of observation and analysis (especially displayed in “Of Insects”), the fascination that the English scientist Isaac Newton’s optical theories held for him (“Of the Rainbow”), and his ambition to publish scientific and philosophical works in confutation of materialism and atheism (“Natural Philosophy”). Throughout his life he habitually studied with pen in hand, recording his thoughts in numerous hand-sewn notebooks; one of these, his “Catalogue” of books, demonstrates the wide variety of his interests.

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Edwards did not accept his theological inheritance passively. In his “Personal Narrative” he confesses that, from his childhood on, his mind “had been full of objections” against the doctrine of predestination—i.e., that God sovereignly chooses some to salvation but rejects others to everlasting torment; “it used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.” Though he gradually worked through his intellectual objections, it was only with his conversion (early in 1721) that he came to a “delightful conviction” of divine sovereignty, to a “new sense” of God’s glory revealed in Scripture and in nature. This became the centre of Edwards’s piety: a direct, intuitive apprehension of God in all his glory, a sight and taste of Christ’s majesty and beauty far beyond all “notional” understanding, immediately imparted to the soul (as a 1734 sermon title puts it) by “a divine and supernatural light.” This alone confers worth on humanity, and in this consists salvation. What such a God does must be right—hence Edwards’s cosmic optimism. The acceptance and affirmation of God as he is and does and the love of God simply because he is God became central motifs in all of Edwards’s preaching.

Under the influence of Puritan and other Reformed divines, the Cambridge Platonists, and British philosopher-scientists such as Newton and Locke, Edwards began to sketch in his manuscripts the outlines of a “Rational Account” of the doctrines of Christianity in terms of contemporary philosophy. In the essay “Of Being,” he argued from the inconceivability of absolute Nothing to the existence of God as the eternal omnipresent Being. It was also inconceivable to him that anything should exist (even universal Being) apart from consciousness; hence, material things exist only as ideas in perceiving minds; the universe depends for its being every moment on the knowledge and creative will of God; and “spirits only are properly substance.” Further, if all knowledge is ultimately from sensation (Locke) and if a sense perception is merely God’s method of communicating ideas to the mind, then all knowledge is directly dependent on the divine will to reveal; and a saving knowledge of God and spiritual things is possible only to those who have received the gift of the “new sense.” This grace is independent of human effort and is “irresistible,” for the perception of God’s beauty and goodness that it confers is in its very nature a glad “consent.” Nevertheless, God decrees conversion and a holy life as well as ultimate felicity; and he has so constituted things that “means of grace” (e.g., sermons, sacraments, even the fear of hell) are employed by the Spirit in conversion, though not as “proper causes.” Thus, the predestinarian preacher could appeal to the emotions and wills of humankind.

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Pastorate at Northampton

At Stoddard’s death in 1729, Edwards became sole occupant of the Northampton pulpit, the most important in Massachusetts outside of Boston. In his first published sermon, preached in 1731 to the Boston clergy and significantly entitled God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It, Edwards blamed New England’s moral ills on its assumption of religious and moral self-sufficiency. Because God is the saints’ whole good, faith, which abases man and exalts God, must be insisted on as the only means of salvation. The English colonists’ enterprising spirit made them susceptible to a version of Arminianism (deriving from the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius), which was popular in the Anglican church and spreading among Dissenters; it minimized the disabling effects of original sin, stressed free will, and tended to make morality the essence of religion.

Against these ideas Edwards also delivered a series of sermons on “Justification by Faith Alone” in November 1734. The result was a great revival in Northampton and along the Connecticut River Valley in the winter and spring of 1734–35, during which period more than 300 of Edwards’s people made professions of faith. His subsequent report, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), made a profound impression in America and Europe, particularly through his description of the types and stages of conversion experience.

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In 1740–42 came the Great Awakening throughout the colonies. George Whitefield, a highly successful evangelist in the English Methodist movement, and Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey, drew huge crowds; their “pathetical” (i.e., emotional) sermons resulted in violent emotional response and mass conversions. Edwards himself, though he held his own congregation relatively calm, employed the “preaching of terror” on several occasions, as in the Enfield sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).

The Awakening produced not only conversions and changed lives but also excesses, disorders, and ecclesiastical and civil disruptions. Though increasingly critical of attitudes and practices associated with the revival, to the extent of personally rebuking Whitefield, Edwards maintained that it was a genuine work of God, which needed to be furthered and purified. In defense and criticism of the Awakening he wrote The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746).

In the Affections, Edwards insisted, against the revival critics’ ideal of sober, “reasonable” religion, that “the essence of all true religion lies in holy love,” a love that proves its genuineness by its inner quality and practical results. In 1749 he edited, with “Reflections,” the memoirs of David Brainerd, a young New Light revivalist who became a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans and died in 1747. The volume became a highly influential missionary biography. Edwards’s Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer (1747), written in support of a proposed international “concert of prayer” for “the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth,” helped to remove a major ideological barrier to missionary activity by arguing that the worst of the “great tribulations” (prophesied in the book of Revelation to John as preceding the millennium) were already past and that the church could thus look forward to an increasing success of the gospel.