Jonathan Edwards (1703-175 cool
Excerpt from Meet the Puritans
by Dr. Joel Beeke and Randall J. Pederson
Jonathan Edwards, often called America’s greatest theologian and philosopher and the last Puritan, was a powerful force behind the First Great Awakening, as well as a champion of Christian zeal and spirituality. Both Christian and secular scholarship concur on his importance in American history. The treasures from Edwards’s pen have been mined, pondered, and evaluated to the present day. His famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is still being read and studied in America’s public schools as a specimen of eighteenth-century literature. Students of American history pay much attention to Edwards’s scientific, philosophical, and psychological writings; theologians and church historians regard Edwards’s work on revivals as unexcelled in analysis and scope. Christians continue to read his sermons with great appreciation for their rich doctrine, clear and forceful style, and powerful depiction of the majesty of God, the sinfulness of sin, and Christ’s power to save.
Still, not everyone agrees about Edwards’s place in the history of Christian thought. Scholars continue to debate his philosophical musings, his fidelity to certain historic Calvinist doctrines, and his influence upon subsequent generations. As Iain H. Murray notes, “Edwards divided men in his lifetime and to no less degree he continues to divide his biographers” (Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, p. xix).
As the huge body of his writings shows, Edwards was intellectually brilliant, multifaceted in his interests, and abundantly creative. Spiritually, he was profound, reflective, experiential, and intense. Early on, he developed the habit of self-mastery and a capacity for unremitting toil. Though laboring in places far from the cultural centers of his society, Edwards influenced many people while he lived and greatly impacted the generations to follow.
Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut. He was the only son of eleven children born to Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard, daughter of Solomon Stoddard. Both Edwards’s father and maternal grandfather greatly influenced his education and career. Solomon Stoddard served for sixty years as minister of the parish church of Northampton, Massachusetts. He was a powerful force in the pulpit, a leader in the churches of western Massachusetts and along the Connecticut River, and a stirring writer. Timothy Edwards was highly educated and also well known as a preacher, and, like Stoddard, no stranger to religious revivals.
Like many other ministers in that day, Timothy Edwards conducted a grammar school in his home, preparing boys for Connecticut’s Collegiate School, known as Yale College after 1718. The school was founded in 1701 as an orthodox Congregationalist alternative to Harvard College, where the prevailing parties were hostile to the ideas proposed in John Cotton’s Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, or, at least, favorable to Episcopalianism.
Edwards received his early education in his father’s school, where he was nurtured and instructed in Reformed theology and the practice of Puritan piety. At age thirteen, he went on to the Collegiate School, which as yet had no permanent home. Several towns were competing for the honor of playing host to the fledgling institution. Edwards went to the nearest location, downriver from Windsor at Wethersfield, to begin his studies with Elisha Williams. When the college finally located at New Haven in 1716 under the rectorship of Timothy Cutler, Edwards went to New Haven, where the course of study included classical and biblical languages, logic, and natural philosophy. He was awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1720, finishing at the top of his class, and then stayed at Yale to study for a master’s degree.
Edwards’s spiritual life was influenced by various factors. His parents, vibrant and intelligent Christians, offered a godly example and nurtured Edwards toward godliness. He went through several periods of spiritual conviction in his childhood and youth, which culminated in his conversion in 1721 after being impacted by the words of 1 Timothy 1:17, “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” He later wrote,
As I read [these] words, there came into my soul…a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense quite different from anything I ever experienced before…. I kept saying and as it were singing over those words of Scripture to myself and went to pray to God that I might enjoy Him…. From that time I began to have a new kind of apprehensions and ideas of Christ, and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salvation by him. And my mind was greatly engaged to spend my time in reading and meditating on Christ, in the beauty of his person and the lovely way of salvation by free grace in Him (from Jonathan Edwards, A Personal Narrative).
Edwards’s ministerial career began in 1722 with a brief sojourn of eight months in New York City. Frictions had arisen between the English members of the First Presbyterian Church and the Scots-Irish majority, led by Scottish minister James Anderson. The English eventually withdrew and began meeting separately. Edwards accepted their invitation to preach for them. Later he wrote: “I went to New York to preach and my longings after God and holiness were much increased. I felt a burning desire to be in everything conformed to the blessed image of Christ...how I should be more holy and live more holily…. The heaven I desired was a heaven of holiness, to be with God and to spend my eternity in holy communion with Christ” (ibid.).
In April 1723, Edwards was persuaded by his father to return to Connecticut. After he had completed work for a master’s degree at Yale, he spoke at commencement exercises. The title of his address was “A Sinner is Not Justified before God except through the Righteousness of Christ obtained by Faith.” That November, Edwards took a call to the parish church at Bolton, about fifteen miles east of Hartford.
The following year, Edwards returned to New Haven to serve as tutor at the college. Yale was in upheaval due to the decision of rector Timothy Cutler in 1722 to abandon Congregationalism and revert to the Church of England. No suitable candidate would agree to take his place, so the college was in the hands of a temporary rector. Each local minister served for a month in rotation, while the forty or so students were left in the care of two tutors. The students were a disorderly lot, adding discipline to the heavy burden of Edwards’s teaching duties. Edwards remained there until 1726, when he received a summons from the people of Northampton, Massachusetts, to come upriver and serve as assistant to his aged grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. Edwards was installed there on February 15, 1727, and became sole minister of the parish church upon the death of Stoddard in 1729.
While at New Haven, Edwards had befriended Sarah Pierrepont, whom he met when he was sixteen years old and she was only thirteen. Friendship blossomed into romance, and the two were wed eight years later in 1727 after Edwards was settled at Northampton. Edwards later described his wife as a model of true conversion in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1743). Their eleven children were the beginning of a large progeny that greatly affected the life and history of New England.
Edwards’s spiritual life was developed by various testings and difficulties. Sometimes he agonized over decisions; sometimes he suffered spells of exhaustion, depression, and serious illness; and often he faced problems and challenges in the pastorate as well as in his personal and family life. As a true Puritan, Edwards sought to discern the message of Providence in every event and to improve spiritually on all that befell him, good or bad.
Edwards’s first publication, based on a lecture given at Boston in 1731, was titled God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence upon Him in the Whole of It. Edwards there spoke of faith as “a sensibleness of what is real,” and as an “absolute and universal” dependence on God. Three years later, his Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God described the work of true regeneration as producing a new “sense of the heart…above all others sweet and joyful.” This “new sense,” apprehended by faith, would become a key to Edwards’s theology.
People who heard Edwards’s sermons undoubtedly appreciated them, yet Edwards was still left with the problem of promoting godliness in a congregation that seemed to be lapsing into spiritual indifference. To correct the errors into which some had fallen during the last years of Stoddard’s pastorate, Edwards focused his preaching in the early 1730s on common, specific sins. He urged people to repent and to embrace the gospel by faith. That theme was repeated in a series of sermons Edwards preached on justification by faith in 1734 (published in 1738 as Five Discourses on Important Subjects), which prompted a significant awakening at Northampton.
Those sermons also set the stage for the forthcoming revival known as The Great Awakening.
In Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, Edwards describes how, in the winter of 1734-1735, the young people and their parents responded to his preaching with renewed interest, wishing a genuine examination of their public and private behavior. People who visited Northampton noticed the change of spiritual climate and returned to their homes bearing Edwards’s message. Meanwhile, independently of Northampton, the Holy Spirit brought revival to other places as well.
After a lull in the late 1730s, Edwards was caught up in the Great Awakening, which began in 1740; he became one of the ablest instruments and defenders of the revival. He preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (Deut. 32:35) at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. The congregation was profoundly moved. A witness wrote, “Before the sermon was done, there was a great moaning and crying out throughout the whole house. What shall I do to be saved? Oh, I am going to hell! Oh, what shall I do for Christ?” Edwards asked for silence, but the tumult increased until Edwards had to stop preaching. A monument to the sermon stood until the twentieth century on the site of the Enfield meeting house (“The Diary of Stephen Williams” in Oliver Means, A Sketch of the Strict Congregation Church of Enfield, Connecticut [Hartford, 1899]).
Edwards worked hard to correct false notions of piety. His aim was twofold: he cared immensely about the spiritual welfare of his congregation’s souls, and he wanted to save the Awakening from disrepute. But when prominent church leaders denounced the revival, Edwards felt compelled to defend the Spirit’s authentic work in it. In September of 1741, Edwards explained the revival in a sermon titled “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God.” He insisted that non-traditional church services, unusual body movements, and strange fancies among the seemingly pious neither proved nor disproved claims of grace. After testing the revival for evidences of true piety, which essentially involved devotion to Jesus as Savior, reverence for and sound interpretations of Scripture, Edwards concluded that it indeed was the work of the Spirit of God. He cautioned that the devil could and would counter this work, however, using men’s own imaginations to produce irrational behavior.
By late 1742, New England Congregationalism was divided into two camps: the “Old Light” anti-Awakening group and the “New Light” pro-Awakening party. Colonial Presbyterians were also of two minds about the Awakening; “New Side” Presbyterians promoted the Awakening against the objections of “Old Side” traditionalists. In an effort to make peace within the clerical community, Edwards wrote Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1742), taking pains to denounce extremists on all sides. He even suggested that the remarkable outpouring of the Spirit in this Awakening could be ushering in the millennium. Pushing the argument from Distinguishing Marks a step further, he insisted that true spiritual life was a matter not only of intellectual assent, but also of the affections. “Now if such things are enthusiasm,” he wrote, “let my brain be evermore possessed of that happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatifical, glorious distraction!”
The Old Lights, however, were not persuaded. Charles Chauncy, one of the greatest opponents of the revival, wrote Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743), denouncing affections as carnal passions and necessarily profane. In response, Edwards published the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), which distinguished between true and false religious experience. It has long been regarded by many historians as his most influential work.
Edwards’s 1749 edition of the diary of a young missionary named David Brainerd was perhaps his most moving publication. Brainerd had been expelled from Yale for slandering a tutor during the Awakening. He was denied reinstatement despite Edwards’s support. He began working among the Delaware Indians in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but tuberculosis forced him to come home. He spent his final days at the home of Edwards, constantly attended by Edwards’s daughter, Jerusha. The loss of this young man, who was like a son to Edwards, moved him deeply. His Life of Brainerd was a tribute to true piety, and it also became a model for missionaries.
Meanwhile, in the late 1740s, Edwards became embroiled in controversy over who should partake of the sacraments. Solomon Stoddard had taught that the Lord’s Supper could be a “converting ordinance” to which any baptized person of blameless life should be admitted. Edwards opposed this view, saying that only people who professed to be converted and who were bringing forth the fruits of conversion in their lives should be received at the Lord’s Table. As a corollary, Edwards said that baptism ought to be administered only to the children of believers who had made a credible profession of faith. That was contrary to the long-established practice of the socalled “Half-Way Covenant,” a modified form of church membership used in some New England Congregational churches. Baptized adults who professed a historical faith without claiming to be converted and who lived uprightly would be regarded as “half-way” church members, so that they could therefore present their children for baptism, though they themselves could not participate in the Lord’s Supper or vote in church matters.
A moment of crisis was reached in 1748 when Edwards told two applicants that they lacked the saving grace necessary to partake of the Lord’s Supper. At the same time, Edwards published his An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of and Qualifications for Communion, which insisted that genuine conversion bears visible fruit and is essential for sacramental privileges. Many townspeople and ministers objected to The Humble Inquiry, concluding that Edwards had gone too far. When these objections were combined with false rumors of Edwards’s treatment of some young people and other complications resulting from several discipline cases, the members of Northampton voted to eject him from the Northampton pulpit. In his farewell sermon on June 22, 1750, Edwards suggested that the discipline cases had turned the town against him. Privately, however, he told a friend that he suspected the real issue was his refusal to baptize infants of members who could not profess saving grace. By a large majority, the Northampton church voted not to change its sacramental practices.
The following year, Edwards left Northampton with his family, taking refuge in the frontier settlement of Stockbridge, near the western border of Massachusetts, where he served as pastor to a small congregation and as a missionary to the Housatonic Indians. He learned to accommodate himself well to the level of understanding of the Native Americans. Here is a simple outline of a sermon preached to them on Hebrews 11:14-16: “(1) This world is an evil country; (2) Heaven is a better country.” His years in Stockbridge were complicated, however, by the outbreak of the French and Indian War, which reached the village in 1754, when several inhabitants were killed.
Though Edwards’s desire to witness revival among the Indians did not materialize, from another perspective these were his most fruitful years. Edwards is often remembered for spending thirteen hours a day in study. Modern readers may be inspired or appalled by that, but we should realize that most workers in those times spent nearly as much time pursuing their callings. Under such circumstances, Edwards would have appeared diligent and faithful to his calling, not overcommitted to study or unbalanced in his use of time. Out of those long hours in the study, and especially from the period of relative isolation at Stockbridge, came a vast body of Edwards’s writings. His greatest literary achievement from this period was Freedom of the Will (1754), in which Edwards argues that only the regenerate person can truly choose the transcendent God; that choice can be made only through a disposition that God infuses in regeneration. In this, Edwards rejected the materialism of the British philosophers along with the utilitarianism of free-will advocates. Logically, Edwards succeeds in making Arminianism an impossibility. Other important works completed during his Stockbridge years include Concerning the End for which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue (both published posthumously in 1765), and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (175 cool —a tour de force against Pelagianism.
In 1758, Edwards agreed to become president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. He left his family that January, as “affectionately as if he should not come again,” one of his daughters wrote; as he departed, he turned back to his wife and said, “I commit you to God” (Karlson and
Crumpacker, eds., The Diary of Esther Edwards Burr: 1754-1757, 1984, p. 302).
Edwards preached his inaugural sermon at Princeton on Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and for ever.” The sermon was two hours long and made a great impact on its hearers. While at Princeton, Edwards hoped to complete two major treatises, one showing the harmony of the Old and New Testaments, and the other, a much-expanded treatise on The History of the Work of Redemption. However, Edwards did not live to complete these works. On March 22, 1758, after only a few months in Princeton, he died of complications from a smallpox inoculation.
The effect of this spiritual giant’s theological insight on New England Christianity has been immense and is often debated. Some say Edwards provided the impetus to move New England beyond the thought of its founders. In that sense, Edwards was a true philosopher. Others say Edwards was the last representative of Puritan theology and thought in the New World, where Puritanism would later be disdained. A third group finds little fault with Edwards or his theology, but accuses his followers of veering from the truths that inspired Edwards. Though Edwards himself stressed godly living, some of his successors discarded the biblically Reformed base which supported that godliness in their attempt to adopt Edwards’s more speculative views and methods. That, in turn, fostered a decline of both doctrinal and experiential Calvinism in New England. This group maintains that Edwards was a theologianphilosopher whose vision died with him, but that is certainly not true. Edwards’s vision continued at Princeton and many other places, and was alive in the Second Great Awakening.
Perhaps the most accurate assessment of Edwards is a combination of several views. Edwards was a profound theologian, as readers of The End for Which God Created the World can attest. Edwards was also a minister with great pastoral sensitivity—consider his Religious Affections. Recent scholarship has focused on Edwards’s metaphysics, gleaning primarily from his philosophical and scientific writings (e.g., Sang Hyun Lee’s The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards [2000] and Paul Helm’s Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian [2003]). Whatever view one may hold, all agree that his writings, specifically his sermons, are profitable specimens of one of America’s best and last Puritans.
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