Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), American theologian and Congregational clergyman, whose sermons stirred the religious revival called the Great Awakening.

Born October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut Colony, Edwards was a child prodigy. At the age of ten he wrote an essay on the nature of the soul. At 13 he entered the Collegiate School of Connecticut (now Yale University) and he graduated in 1720 as valedictorian of his class. After two additional years of study in theology at Yale, he preached for eight months in a New York church and then returned to Yale as a college tutor, studying, at the same time, for his master's degree. He was ordained in 1727 and received a call to assist his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony.

When Edwards was 26, his grandfather died, and the young man became pastor at Northampton. He was a firm believer in Calvinism and the doctrine of predestination; a tendency toward belief in Arminianism, an ideology that challenged several fundamental principles of strict Calvinism, however, existed in the New England colonies. In 1731, in Boston, Edwards preached his first public attack on Arminianism and, in a sermon entitled “God Glorified in Man's Dependence,” called for a return to rigorous Calvinism. Three years later he delivered a series of powerful sermons on the same subject in his own church; the series included the famous “Reality of Spiritual Light,” in which the preacher combined Calvinism with mysticism, religious experience directly given and experienced.

He was a notable pulpit orator. The result of his 1734-1735 sermons was a religious revival in which a great number of conversions were made; Edwards received 300 new members into his church. Some of the converted were so obsessed by his fiery descriptions of eternal damnation that they contemplated suicide. In 1740 the British evangelist George Whitefield visited Edwards. Together, the two men started a revival movement that became known as the Great Awakening and developed into a religious frenzy engulfing all New England. The conversions were characterized by convulsions and hysteria on the part of the converts, and the harshness and appeal to religious fear in one of Edward's sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” caused his congregation to rise weeping and moaning from their seats. By 1742 the revival movement had grown out of control, and for the next 60 to 70 years it had the effect on American religion of preventing any attempt at a liberal interpretation of doctrine.

In Northampton, Edwards's sermons created a demand for sterner religious discipline. Eventually, however, his congregation turned against him because of his high-handedness and bigotry. He instituted disciplinary proceedings in church against young people who had been reading what he considered improper books; later, he objected strongly to the Halfway Covenant, a New England church custom that permitted baptized persons to have all the privileges of church membership except communion although they had not openly professed conversion. A council representing ten congregations in the region dismissed Edwards in 1750. The following year he received a call to Stockbridge, in Massachusetts, then on the frontier, where he became pastor of the village church and missionary to the Housatonic people. In Stockbridge, during the next seven years, he wrote his most important theological works. Among them was A Careful and Strict Enquiry into ... Notions of ... Freedom of Will ... (1754), in which he denied that human beings have self-determined will that can initiate acts not known or decreed beforehand by God; it remains one of the most famous theological works ever written in America.

In 1757, Edwards accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). He was inaugurated in 1758, but five weeks later, on March 22, 1758, he died as the result of an inoculation against smallpox, which was then epidemic. Among his other works are A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (1754), and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758).