Jonathan Edwards 1703 – 1758 · the Great Awakening · religious affections, original sin, freedom of the will · the colonial Reformed mind

Childhood, family, and Yale

OriginsEdwards was born on 5 October 1703 at East Windsor, Connecticut, the fifth of eleven children and the only son of the Rev. Timothy Edwards, the local Congregational minister, and Esther Stoddard Edwards (daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the powerful Connecticut Valley pastor who would later be Edwards's grandfather, mentor, and predecessor at Northampton). The household was rigorously religious — daily family worship, regular catechetical instruction, careful Sabbath observance, the routine pastoral discipline of a New England Congregational manse — and intellectually serious; Timothy Edwards tutored his son in Latin from an early age. The young Edwards was at Yale by age thirteen.

Yale yearsEdwards graduated BA in September 1720 (valedictorian of his class) and remained at Yale for an MA, completed 1722. The Yale of Edwards's student years was in a period of theological and institutional turbulence (the rector Timothy Cutler defected to Anglicanism in 1722 — the "Yale apostasy" — taking several colleagues with him), but the curriculum was solidly Reformed Calvinist. Edwards's surviving notebooks from this period — the early "Notes on the Mind," the early "Of Being," and the beginnings of the lifelong "Miscellanies" project — reveal a precocious philosophical and theological mind already engaging Locke, Newton, and the early Enlightenment. He was licensed to preach in 1722 and served as a Presbyterian supply minister in New York City briefly (1722–1723) before returning to Yale as tutor (effectively rector during a vacancy) from 1724 to 1726.

Northampton — assistantship and succession to Stoddard

Edwards was ordained on 15 February 1727 as assistant to his maternal grandfather Solomon Stoddard, the powerful pastor of Northampton (the largest church in the Connecticut Valley after Boston). On Stoddard's death two years later (February 1729) Edwards succeeded him as senior pastor — at age twenty-five, with the responsibility of one of the most influential pulpits in colonial New England. He married Sarah Pierpont, daughter of the Yale founder James Pierpont, on 28 July 1727; she was seventeen, he twenty-three. The marriage was one of the most celebrated in colonial New England Puritan history (Edwards's later short manuscript "Apostrophe to Sarah Pierpont" is a striking spiritual portrait of his young wife), and produced eleven children, most of whom survived to adulthood and many of whom became prominent in colonial and early American religious and academic life.

The Connecticut Valley Revival (1734–1735)

In the winter of 1734–35 Edwards's preaching at Northampton — a sermon series on justification by faith alone, in conscious response to the rising Arminian influence of some New England preachers — was attended by an unusual movement of religious awakening in the town and the surrounding Connecticut Valley villages. Several hundred persons in the town professed conversion over the following months; the revival spread to neighbouring towns; the pattern was sufficiently striking that Edwards composed a careful narrative of it for English correspondents (A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, published in London 1737 with prefaces by Isaac Watts and John Guyse). The 1734–35 revival was the precursor of the larger Great Awakening that would break out five years later.

The Great Awakening (1740–1742)

Whitefield's tourThe English Anglican itinerant George Whitefield arrived in New England in October 1740, and his preaching produced an outpouring of religious awakening across the colonies on a scale that dwarfed the 1734–35 revival. Whitefield visited Northampton in October 1740; Edwards's own preaching in 1741 and 1742, especially during itinerant ministry in surrounding towns, was central to the New England phase of the Awakening. Edwards's sermon at Enfield, Connecticut, on 8 July 1741 — "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," delivered to a congregation reportedly weeping and crying out under conviction — became the most famous sermon in colonial American religious history.

The defence of the AwakeningThe Awakening provoked both extraordinary religious response and intense controversy. Some of the "extraordinary" phenomena — physical manifestations, ecstatic responses, popular itinerancy — alarmed the more conservative "Old Light" New England clergy (Charles Chauncy of Boston being the principal opponent, in his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, 1743). Edwards produced two defences of the Awakening that have become foundational evangelical texts on revival: The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), distinguishing genuine and counterfeit revival phenomena, and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742). The pastoral and theological discernment of The Distinguishing Marks would mature into the major work on Christian experience, A Treatise concerning Religious Affections (1746).

The Northampton dismissal (1750)

The communion controversy at Northampton began in 1748–49 when Edwards, after sustained study and reflection, concluded that the policy his grandfather Stoddard had established (and that Edwards had inherited and maintained for nearly two decades) of admitting to the Lord's Supper persons who had not made a credible profession of personal saving faith was contrary to Scripture. Edwards announced that he would henceforth require communicants to make such a profession. The Northampton congregation — accustomed to Stoddard's broader practice, which had been the basis of the town's religious life for nearly seventy years — resisted. Edwards published An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church (1749) setting out the theological case; the congregation called a church council; on 22 June 1750 the council voted 10 to 9 to dismiss Edwards. The dismissal was painful for both pastor and congregation and the wound never fully healed in Edwards's lifetime. Marsden's biography and the modern scholarly literature have substantially revised earlier hagiographic and demonising accounts of the controversy: the substantive theological case was Edwards's; the pastoral inflexibility (he refused, for over a year, to preach in a way that engaged the congregation's anxieties beyond the bare doctrinal point) was real; the congregation's hardness was also real.

Stockbridge — the missionary years

After his dismissal Edwards accepted the call to the mission station at Stockbridge, Massachusetts (a small frontier town on the western Massachusetts border, with a small English Congregational community and a substantial Mohican Native American mission community supported by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge). He served at Stockbridge from August 1751 until his departure for Princeton in early 1758. The Stockbridge years were materially difficult — the salary was modest, the political situation on the frontier was unstable (the French and Indian War's New England theatre was active from 1754), and Edwards's relations with the local English settlers were sometimes strained. But the Stockbridge years were Edwards's most theologically productive: Freedom of the Will (1754); the manuscript that would be published posthumously as The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue; Original Sin (substantially complete by 1757, published posthumously 1758); large portions of the never-completed History of the Work of Redemption; substantial advance on the Harmony of the Old and New Testaments; further work on the Miscellanies. The major Edwardsean dogmatic corpus is the product of these Stockbridge years.

Princeton and death (1757–1758)

The trustees of the College of New Jersey (the predecessor of Princeton University, founded 1746 by New Side Presbyterians) elected Edwards as president in September 1757 to succeed his recently deceased son-in-law Aaron Burr Sr. Edwards was reluctant to leave Stockbridge and the work he had in hand, but accepted under pressure from the Stockbridge church council. He arrived at Princeton in January 1758 and was inaugurated as president on 16 February. A smallpox epidemic was active in the area; Edwards received the new inoculation procedure in late February (a procedure that involved the deliberate introduction of a mild case of smallpox to confer immunity); the inoculation went badly, and Edwards died from complications on 22 March 1758, at age fifty-four. His daughter Esther Burr (Aaron Burr Jr.'s mother) died sixteen days later; his wife Sarah, travelling to settle his affairs, died in October. The compressed sequence of deaths was a tragedy for the Edwards family; Edwards's death cut short what would presumably have been a long and influential Princeton presidency.

A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737)

A Faithful Narrative is Edwards's careful pastoral and theological description of the 1734–35 Northampton revival, written for English correspondents and published in London with prefaces by Isaac Watts (the great Reformed hymn-writer) and John Guyse (a London Independent minister). The work established a template for what would later be called a "revival narrative" — careful, theologically discriminating, alert both to the genuine work of God and to counterfeit responses — and it played a major role in shaping the wider mid-eighteenth-century evangelical understanding of revival. The text is in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4 (Yale).

The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741)

Edwards delivered The Distinguishing Marks as the commencement sermon at Yale on 10 September 1741. The work distinguishes the genuine work of the Spirit (the supernatural conviction of sin, the supernatural disclosure of Christ as Saviour, the supernatural production of love to God and neighbour) from the merely human phenomena that may accompany it (physical manifestations, intense emotional responses, ecstatic experiences). The principle is Edwards's mature pastoral discrimination: the genuine work of the Spirit is known by its substantive theological and ethical fruits, not by its outward dramatic phenomena. The work is the seed of the more comprehensive Religious Affections (1746). Text in The Works, vol. 4.

A Treatise concerning Religious Affections (1746)

Why it mattersReligious Affections is Edwards's masterpiece on Christian religious experience and probably his single most pastorally enduring work. The structure: Part 1 establishes that true religion consists in substantial measure in the affections (the deep dispositions and inclinations of the soul, distinguished both from cold cognition and from mere passing emotion); Part 2 sets out twelve "negative signs" — features that may accompany either true or counterfeit religion and that therefore cannot reliably distinguish them (high religious feelings, much religious talk, scriptural language in prayer, etc.); Part 3 sets out twelve "positive signs" — features that genuinely distinguish the work of the Spirit (gracious affections arise from divine influence; their object is the divine nature itself; they produce true humility and gentleness; they produce a thirst after holiness; they bear fruit in Christian practice; etc.). The work is the standard Reformed treatment of the question "how do I know my conversion is real?"

Reformed readingThe Reformed pastor and the careful believer profit from Religious Affections at every reading. The work is pastorally rich, theologically discriminating, and exegetically grounded. The Banner of Truth abridged edition (ed. James Houston, 1984) is the standard accessible introduction; the full text is in The Works, vol. 2 (Yale). Sam Storms's Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards's Religious Affections (Crossway, 2007) is the standard recent Reformed commentary. Religious Affections page.

Freedom of the Will (1754)

Edwards's Freedom of the Will is the most sustained Reformed engagement with the libertarian-free-will position then being advanced by Daniel Whitby, Thomas Chubb, and the broader Arminian and Enlightenment-era English theological scene. Edwards distinguishes between moral necessity (the necessary connection between the human person's moral state and the choices that flow from it — what the fallen will, being morally corrupt, necessarily wills) and natural necessity (external compulsion); he argues that moral necessity is compatible with genuine moral agency and responsibility; he presses the case that the libertarian position is incoherent. The work is the principal Reformed scholastic-philosophical defence of the Augustinian doctrine of the bondage of the will against the Enlightenment-era alternative. Allen C. Guelzo's Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Wesleyan, 1989) is the standard historical-theological treatment of the work's reception. Freedom of the Will page.

Original Sin (1758)

Original Sin is Edwards's reply to the English Dissenting minister John Taylor of Norwich, whose The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (1738; second edition 1750) had advanced a substantially Pelagian denial of inherited sin's reality. Edwards's reply defends the federal-representative reading of Romans 5:12–21 (Adam's sin imputed to his posterity through covenantal headship), the empirical case for universal human sinfulness (drawn from observation of universal moral failure), and the philosophical-theological framework for understanding the unity of the race in Adam. The work develops Edwards's distinctive metaphysical reading of identity-over-time (his account of how Adam and his posterity are united in a real metaphysical sense, sometimes called his "Realist" or "occasionalist" reading) — a metaphysical detail the broader Reformed dogmatic tradition has not always followed, while receiving the substantive doctrine. See Pelagianism for the wider patristic and Reformation context.

The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue

These two short dissertations, written in the Stockbridge years and published together posthumously by Edwards's son Jonathan Edwards Jr. in 1765, are the most concentrated statement of Edwards's mature philosophical-theological vision. The End for Which God Created the World argues that God's ultimate end in creation is his own glory — the manifestation, communication, and acknowledgement of his own perfections — and that the creature's highest happiness consists in receiving and reflecting that glory back to God. The Nature of True Virtue develops the ethical implications: true virtue is "love to Being in general," ultimately to God as Being itself, in distinction from the various forms of secondary or limited love that constitute merely natural virtue. The two works together are the foundation of John Piper's "Christian hedonism" project (Desiring God, 1986; God's Passion for His Glory, 1998, which reprints The End for Which God Created the World with Piper's commentary). Modern Reformed engagement with Edwards's ethical and metaphysical thought (Stephen Holmes, McClymond and McDermott, Oliver Crisp) builds extensively on these two dissertations.

The Life of David Brainerd (1749) and the missionary inheritance

Edwards edited and published the diary of David Brainerd (1718–1747), the young Scottish-American Presbyterian missionary to the Delaware Native Americans, who had died of tuberculosis at the Edwards home in October 1747 (Brainerd was engaged to Edwards's daughter Jerusha, who herself died shortly afterward, also of tuberculosis). The published Life (1749) became one of the most influential missionary biographies in the history of Protestant Christianity, shaping the eighteenth-century evangelical missionary imagination and read by Henry Martyn, William Carey, David Livingstone, and many of the principal figures of the nineteenth-century missionary movement. The Reformed evangelical missionary tradition owes more to Edwards's edition of Brainerd than is often recognised.

The Miscellanies and the unfinished projects

Throughout his life Edwards kept a series of theological notebooks he called "Miscellanies," eventually running to over 1400 numbered entries on topics ranging across the whole field of Christian theology. These were Edwards's working notebooks, never intended for publication in his lifetime, but they have been edited and published in the Yale critical edition (vols. 13, 18, 20, 23) and provide an unparalleled window into his developing theological mind. Two large projects he intended to complete in retirement at Princeton — a comprehensive History of the Work of Redemption (treating the whole history of God's redemptive work as a single theological narrative from creation to consummation) and a Harmony of the Old and New Testaments (an exegetical and typological project) — were unfinished at his death. The substantial drafts and notes have been published in the Yale edition; modern Reformed scholarship continues to engage Edwards's intended projects as well as his published works.

Charles Chauncy and the Old Light opposition to the Awakening

Chauncy was the principal "Old Light" opponent of the Great Awakening, articulating in his Seasonable Thoughts (1743) the conservative New England clergy's anxieties about the emotional and itinerant phenomena of the revival. Edwards's Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742) and the more mature Religious Affections (1746) are in substantial part the engagement with Chauncy's concerns. The disagreement was real and substantive: Chauncy worried that the Awakening was producing "enthusiasm" (the historic Reformed term for ungrounded religious experience claiming direct revelation); Edwards argued that genuine revival was occurring alongside real counterfeit phenomena and required discriminating pastoral and theological engagement. Modern scholarship (Marsden, Sweeney) has substantially vindicated Edwards's careful position while acknowledging the genuine concerns Chauncy raised. Chauncy himself eventually moved toward an explicitly Universalist soteriology in his later years — the historical irony of the Old Light position that began by criticising revival excess and ended in denying the gospel of justification by faith alone.

Daniel Whitby and the Arminian challenge to Reformed soteriology

Whitby's A Discourse Concerning the Five Points (1710) was the principal English-language Arminian engagement with the Reformed Five Points (the doctrines summarised at Dort 1618–19). Edwards's Freedom of the Will is, among other things, the careful Reformed reply to Whitby's account of free will and election. The substantive Reformed-Arminian debate runs through Edwards's mature theological work, and the modern Reformed engagement with Arminian theology (in Robert Peterson and Michael Williams, Why I Am Not an Arminian, IVP, 2004, and the symmetrical Arminian self-presentation in Roger Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities, IVP, 2006) carries the Edwardsean conversation forward. See Dort.

John Taylor of Norwich and the denial of original sin

Taylor's book on original sin advanced a substantially Pelagian-Unitarian denial of inherited sin and of the federal-representative reading of Romans 5. Edwards's Original Sin (completed 1757, published posthumously 1758) is the major Reformed reply to Taylor — and through Taylor, to the broader eighteenth-century rationalist denial of historic Christian anthropology. The Reformed defence of original sin in the modern Reformed dogmatic tradition (Bavinck, Berkhof, Murray, Frame, Horton) carries Edwards's argument forward. See Pelagianism.

The Northampton communion controversy and the Stoddardean inheritance

The communion controversy at Northampton in 1749–50 was the long-deferred reckoning with the practice Edwards had inherited from his grandfather Solomon Stoddard. Stoddard had taught that the Lord's Supper was a "converting ordinance" — that is, a means God might use to bring an unconverted but morally serious person to genuine saving faith — and accordingly admitted to communion persons who could give no credible profession of personal saving faith but who were morally sober and not openly scandalous. The practice was unique to Stoddard's region and was theologically controversial within New England Congregationalism from its first articulation. Edwards's mature theological judgement (set out in An Humble Inquiry, 1749) was that the practice was contrary to Scripture; his enforcement of the changed standard against the long-settled Northampton custom precipitated the dismissal of 1750. The Reformed reader notes that Edwards's substantive theological position is the historic Reformed position (the Lord's Supper is a sealing ordinance for the visibly faithful, not a converting ordinance for the morally serious), but acknowledges that the pastoral execution of the policy change at Northampton was clumsy and contributed to the painful outcome.

The New Divinity — Edwards's immediate American successors

The "New Divinity" movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American Congregationalism — Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards Jr., and Timothy Dwight (Yale president 1795–1817) — was the principal direct theological inheritance from Edwards. The movement carried his theology in some substantively faithful directions (the defence of Reformed soteriology against Arminianism; the development of moral government theory of the atonement, in some figures more than others) and in some directions that the broader Reformed tradition has not followed (Hopkins's distinctive doctrine of "disinterested benevolence"; the New Divinity's eventual influence on the rise of New Haven theology in the early nineteenth century, which moved further from historic Reformed orthodoxy). The modern Reformed engagement with the New Divinity is nuanced; the movement was a mixed Edwardsean inheritance.

The Princeton tradition and the broader Reformed reception

The Old Princeton theology of Charles Hodge (1797–1878), Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), and B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) drew extensively on Edwards while substantially refining his more speculative metaphysical claims (Hodge in particular was sceptical of Edwards's idealism and occasionalism). The Princeton inheritance carried Edwards's substantive soteriological and biblical-theological work into mainstream American Reformed Christianity. The mid-twentieth-century Banner of Truth and Reformation Heritage Books revival made Edwards's principal works newly accessible to the modern Reformed evangelical reader; the current Reformed evangelical resurgence (Piper, Ferguson, Sproul, Storms, DeYoung, and many others) draws on Edwards extensively. The modern Edwards scholarship (Marsden, Murray, Sweeney, McClymond and McDermott, Holmes, Strobel, Crisp) has placed him firmly in the canon of major Reformed theologians.

The Edwardsean missionary inheritance

Edwards's edition of Brainerd's diary (1749) became one of the principal devotional texts of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant missionary movement. William Carey's An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) — the founding document of the modern Baptist Missionary Society and a critical text of the wider missionary movement — drew explicitly on Edwards's eschatology and his missionary biography. Henry Martyn read Brainerd; David Brainerd's example was cited across the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary literature. The modern Reformed evangelical missionary impulse — preserved in organisations from OMF to Reformed Mission Boards to the modern unreached-peoples movement — has Edwards as one of its principal eighteenth-century theological roots.