EDWARDS, JONATHAN
(5 October 1703, East Windsor, CT-22 March 1758, Princeton, NJ). Education: B.A., Yale College, 1720; postgraduate theology studies, Yale College, 1721-22. Career: Minister, Presbyterian church, New York, 1722-23; tutor, Yale College, 1724-26; minister, Congregational church, Northampton, MA, 1726-50; minister and missionary, Stockbridge, MA, 1751-58; president, College of New Jersey (later Princeton), 1758.
Jonathan Edwards, founder of the New England theology, is regarded by many scholars as the preeminent American theologian. And yet most Americans know him by one sermon, hardly representative of his work. In a famous passage in the Enfield sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards compares man to a spider: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours." This was a heady passage, and in later years Edwards and Puritanism as a whole were stereotyped by these words. They suggest that he and Puritanism, were morbid, pessimistic, and cruel.
A better understanding of the Enfield sermon will lead us to a better understanding of Edwards. In certain ways the discourse does reflect his ministry. It was a revivalistic sermon, seeking to touch the emotions as well as the intellects of the audience. And Edwards was a revivalist, one of the most effective in New England His Connecticut River Valley revival of 1734-35 anticipated the Great Awakening by half a decade. And his accounts of that revival and the Awakening helped inspire later revivals. Also, the Enfield sermon contains graphic accounts of the sinner's peril of damnation. And Edwards was a Calvinist, believing fully in original sin, arbitrary election, and limited atonement In such ways the sermon does represent Edwards and his ideas. It is misleading, none the less, in so far as it suggests that terror and estrangement were the essence of Edwards's theology.
In fact, the contrary is true. Jonathan Edwards came to know God through feelings of love and communion-through a "sweet delight in God." In a narrative of his conversion he wrote, "God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature." Such communion was for him the finest thing in life, the meaning of life. Williston Walker rightly calls him a mystic and a seer as well as a dialectic theologian. And Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr. notes that "Even his passing glimpses of beauty he grounded in the very being of God." Why then the emphasis on sin and estrangement?
Like the early Puritans, Edwards believed that people were cut off from God by human nature. Without divine illumination, they simply went about life as if there were no God. In preaching about sin, Edwards sought to bring his audience out of that prison of egotism to an encounter with the living God. The person who had been brought to a humble sense of his or her own limitations, perhaps by a discourse like the Enfield sermon, was a person who was ready to receive the divine and supernatural light of God's grace.
Edwards's external biography is easily summarized. The son of clergyman Timothy Edwards, a revivalist himself, Jonathan Edwards demonstrated his intellectual prowess while young, writing a letter about materialism when he was nine and treatises on natural philosophy when twelve. He attended Yale, where he read and admired John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, which influenced his later thinking about the human mind. Also a student of Newton, he believed that new ideas about the mind and the universe pointed, if properly understood, to a deeper understanding of God. After graduation he preached for a·· short time in New York. He returned to Yale as a tutor shortly after the college had been shaken by "the Great Apostasy"-the defection of most of the faculty to the Anglican Church. Edwards helped return the college to its orthodox beginnings. He was then called to Northampton to serve as colleague pastor to his grandfather, Solomon "Pope" Stoddard*. Edwards inherited his grandfather's interest in revivals and devotion to the doctrine of salvation by grace, but he came to dislike the old man's practice of open communion. Edwards fostered a local revival and strongly supported the Great Awakening. But his desire to limit access to communion, made explicit in the 1740s, resulted in his dismissal from the church in 1750. At that point colonial America's greatest theologian found himself preaching through an interpreter to the Housatonic Indians in the Congregational mission at Stockbridge.
While in that remote corner of the world, Edwards wrote treatises on the freedom of the will, original sin, true virtue, and God's purpose in creating the world-now classics of American religious writing. They reflect his personal encounter with God and are filled with a sense of God as a living reality. He defmed true virtue as "benevolence to Being in general."
Edwards was invited to be president of Princeton. Shortly after his arrival, he was inoculated for smallpox and died. As a young man Jonathan Edwards had drafted seventy resolutions to guide his life. The most memorable suggests the quality of his life: "Resolved, To live with all my might, while I do live."
Bibliography
A: God Glorified in the Work of Redemption (Boston, 1131); A Divine and Supernatural Light Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God (Boston, 1134); A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (London, 1131; New Haven, 1912); Five Discourses on Justification by Faith (Boston, 1138); Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (Boston, 1141); Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (Boston, 1142); A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Boston, 1146; New Haven, 1959); An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Compleat Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church (Boston, 1149); A Farewel-Sermon Preached at the First Precinct in Northampton (Boston, 1151); A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will, Which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency (Boston, 1154; New Haven, 1951); The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (Boston, 1158; New Haven, 1910); Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960) [first published as part of Two Dissertations, Boston, 1165]; An Essay on the Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960) [first published in Two Dissertations]; The Works of President Edwards, ed. Sereno E. Dwight. 10 vols. (New York, 1829-30).
B: AAP I, 329-35; BSGYC I, 218-26; DAB 6, 30-31; DARB, 141-43; NCAB 5, 464-65; NCE 5,183-84; SH 4,80-81; Alexander V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1889); Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Jr., Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1932); Ola E. Winslow, Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1940); Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758 (New York, 1949); Ralph G. Turnbull, Jonathan Edwards, The Preacher (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1958); Douglas J. Elwood, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1960); John H. Gerstner, Steps to Salvation: The Evangelical Message of Jonathan Edwards (Philadelphia, 1960); Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (New York, 1966); Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and its British. Context (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981); John H. Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards; A Mini-Theology (Wheaton, Ill, 1981); Nathan O. Hatch, ed., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert W. Jenson, America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1988); Vincent Tomas, 'The Modernity of Jonathan Edwards," New England Quarterly, 25 (1952), 60-84; Jean-Pierre Martin, "Edwards' Epistemology and the New Science," Early American Literature, 1 (1913), 241-55; Stephen J. Stein, "Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow: Biblical Exegesis and Poetic Imagination," New England Quarterly, 41 (1914), 440-56; Sang Hyun Lee, "Mental Imagery and the Perception of Beauty in Jonathan Edwards," Harvard Theological Review, 69 (1916),369-96; Wilson H. Kimnach, "Jonathan Edwards' Early Sermons: New York, 1122-1123," Journal of Presbyterian History, 53 (1911), 255-66; Stephen J. Stein, 'The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards," Harvard Theological Review, 10 (1911), 99-113.
Jonathan Edwards, founder of the New England theology, is regarded by many scholars as the preeminent American theologian. And yet most Americans know him by one sermon, hardly representative of his work. In a famous passage in the Enfield sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards compares man to a spider: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours." This was a heady passage, and in later years Edwards and Puritanism as a whole were stereotyped by these words. They suggest that he and Puritanism, were morbid, pessimistic, and cruel.
A better understanding of the Enfield sermon will lead us to a better understanding of Edwards. In certain ways the discourse does reflect his ministry. It was a revivalistic sermon, seeking to touch the emotions as well as the intellects of the audience. And Edwards was a revivalist, one of the most effective in New England His Connecticut River Valley revival of 1734-35 anticipated the Great Awakening by half a decade. And his accounts of that revival and the Awakening helped inspire later revivals. Also, the Enfield sermon contains graphic accounts of the sinner's peril of damnation. And Edwards was a Calvinist, believing fully in original sin, arbitrary election, and limited atonement In such ways the sermon does represent Edwards and his ideas. It is misleading, none the less, in so far as it suggests that terror and estrangement were the essence of Edwards's theology.
In fact, the contrary is true. Jonathan Edwards came to know God through feelings of love and communion-through a "sweet delight in God." In a narrative of his conversion he wrote, "God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature." Such communion was for him the finest thing in life, the meaning of life. Williston Walker rightly calls him a mystic and a seer as well as a dialectic theologian. And Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr. notes that "Even his passing glimpses of beauty he grounded in the very being of God." Why then the emphasis on sin and estrangement?
Like the early Puritans, Edwards believed that people were cut off from God by human nature. Without divine illumination, they simply went about life as if there were no God. In preaching about sin, Edwards sought to bring his audience out of that prison of egotism to an encounter with the living God. The person who had been brought to a humble sense of his or her own limitations, perhaps by a discourse like the Enfield sermon, was a person who was ready to receive the divine and supernatural light of God's grace.
Edwards's external biography is easily summarized. The son of clergyman Timothy Edwards, a revivalist himself, Jonathan Edwards demonstrated his intellectual prowess while young, writing a letter about materialism when he was nine and treatises on natural philosophy when twelve. He attended Yale, where he read and admired John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, which influenced his later thinking about the human mind. Also a student of Newton, he believed that new ideas about the mind and the universe pointed, if properly understood, to a deeper understanding of God. After graduation he preached for a·· short time in New York. He returned to Yale as a tutor shortly after the college had been shaken by "the Great Apostasy"-the defection of most of the faculty to the Anglican Church. Edwards helped return the college to its orthodox beginnings. He was then called to Northampton to serve as colleague pastor to his grandfather, Solomon "Pope" Stoddard*. Edwards inherited his grandfather's interest in revivals and devotion to the doctrine of salvation by grace, but he came to dislike the old man's practice of open communion. Edwards fostered a local revival and strongly supported the Great Awakening. But his desire to limit access to communion, made explicit in the 1740s, resulted in his dismissal from the church in 1750. At that point colonial America's greatest theologian found himself preaching through an interpreter to the Housatonic Indians in the Congregational mission at Stockbridge.
While in that remote corner of the world, Edwards wrote treatises on the freedom of the will, original sin, true virtue, and God's purpose in creating the world-now classics of American religious writing. They reflect his personal encounter with God and are filled with a sense of God as a living reality. He defmed true virtue as "benevolence to Being in general."
Edwards was invited to be president of Princeton. Shortly after his arrival, he was inoculated for smallpox and died. As a young man Jonathan Edwards had drafted seventy resolutions to guide his life. The most memorable suggests the quality of his life: "Resolved, To live with all my might, while I do live."
Bibliography
A: God Glorified in the Work of Redemption (Boston, 1131); A Divine and Supernatural Light Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God (Boston, 1134); A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (London, 1131; New Haven, 1912); Five Discourses on Justification by Faith (Boston, 1138); Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (Boston, 1141); Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (Boston, 1142); A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Boston, 1146; New Haven, 1959); An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Compleat Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church (Boston, 1149); A Farewel-Sermon Preached at the First Precinct in Northampton (Boston, 1151); A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will, Which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency (Boston, 1154; New Haven, 1951); The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (Boston, 1158; New Haven, 1910); Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960) [first published as part of Two Dissertations, Boston, 1165]; An Essay on the Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960) [first published in Two Dissertations]; The Works of President Edwards, ed. Sereno E. Dwight. 10 vols. (New York, 1829-30).
B: AAP I, 329-35; BSGYC I, 218-26; DAB 6, 30-31; DARB, 141-43; NCAB 5, 464-65; NCE 5,183-84; SH 4,80-81; Alexander V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1889); Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Jr., Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1932); Ola E. Winslow, Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1940); Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758 (New York, 1949); Ralph G. Turnbull, Jonathan Edwards, The Preacher (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1958); Douglas J. Elwood, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1960); John H. Gerstner, Steps to Salvation: The Evangelical Message of Jonathan Edwards (Philadelphia, 1960); Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (New York, 1966); Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and its British. Context (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981); John H. Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards; A Mini-Theology (Wheaton, Ill, 1981); Nathan O. Hatch, ed., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert W. Jenson, America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1988); Vincent Tomas, 'The Modernity of Jonathan Edwards," New England Quarterly, 25 (1952), 60-84; Jean-Pierre Martin, "Edwards' Epistemology and the New Science," Early American Literature, 1 (1913), 241-55; Stephen J. Stein, "Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow: Biblical Exegesis and Poetic Imagination," New England Quarterly, 41 (1914), 440-56; Sang Hyun Lee, "Mental Imagery and the Perception of Beauty in Jonathan Edwards," Harvard Theological Review, 69 (1916),369-96; Wilson H. Kimnach, "Jonathan Edwards' Early Sermons: New York, 1122-1123," Journal of Presbyterian History, 53 (1911), 255-66; Stephen J. Stein, 'The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards," Harvard Theological Review, 10 (1911), 99-113.