Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards, (b. Oct. 5, 1703, East
Windsor, Conn. [U.S.]—d. March 22, 1758,
Princeton, N.J.), 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’ father, Timothy, was pastor of
the church at East Windsor, Conn.; his
mother, Esther, was a daughter of
Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church
at Northampton, Mass. 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,
Conn., 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’ 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.
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’ 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 man,
and in this consists his salvation. What
such a God does must be right; hence,
Edwards’ 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’ 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 men.
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 Glorifiedin 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’ 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.
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 the Indians
and died in 1747. The volume became a
highly influential missionary biography.
Edwards’ 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 among men.
Dismissal from Northampton.
Meanwhile, Edwards’ relations with his
own congregation had become strained;
one reason for it was his changed views
on the requirements for admission to the
Lord’s Supper. In the Halfway Covenant,
baptized but unconverted children of
believers might have their own children
baptized by “owning the covenant”;
Stoddard had instituted the subsequently
widespread practice of admitting to the
Eucharist all who were thus “in the
covenant,” even if they knew themselves
to be unconverted. Edwards gradually
came to believe that the profession
required for admission to full communion
should be understood to imply genuine
faith, not merely doctrinal knowledge
and good moral behaviour.
The
public announcement of his position in
1749 precipitated a violent controversy
that resulted in his dismissal. On July
1, 1750, Edwards preached his dignified
and restrained “Farewell-Sermon.” In the
course of this controversy he wrote two
books, Qualifications for Communion
(1749) and Misrepresentations Corrected,
and Truth Vindicated, in a Reply to the
Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams’s Book (1752),
one to convince his congregation, the
other to correct what he considered
misrepresentations of his views by a
kinsman, the pastor at Lebanon, Conn.
Though Edwards himself was defeated, his
position finally triumphed and provided
New England Congregationalism with a
doctrine of church membership more
appropriate to its situation after
disestablishment.
Pastorate at Stockbridge
In 1751 Edwards became pastor of the
frontier church at Stockbridge, Mass.,
and missionary to the Indians there.
Hampered by language difficulties,
illness, Indian wars, and conflicts with
powerful personal enemies, he
nevertheless discharged his pastoral
duties and found time to write his
famous work on the Freedom of Will
(1754). The will, said Edwards, is not a
separate, self-determining faculty with
power to act contrary to the strongest
motives, as he understood the Arminians
to teach. Rather, it is identical with
feelings or preference, and a volition
is simply the soul’s “prevailing
inclination” in action; the will “is as
the greatest apparent good.” Men are
free to do as they please, and God
therefore rightly holds them morally
responsible for the quality of their
volitions as expressions of their
desires and intentions.
By 1757
Edwards had finished his Great Christian
Doctrine of Original Sin Defended
(1758), which was mainly a reply to the
English divine John Taylor of Norwich,
whose works attacking Calvinism (based
on the thought of the 16th-century
Protestant Reformer John Calvin) had
“made a mighty noise in America.”
Edwards defended the doctrine not only
by citing biblical statements about the
corruption of man’s heart but also by
arguing that the empirical evidence of
men’s universal commission of sinful
acts points to a sinful predisposition
in every man. In answering Arminian
objections to the notion that God
“imputed” Adam’s guilt to his posterity,
Edwards proposed a novel theory of
identity by divine “constitution” to
account for men’s unity with Adam and
suggested that their innate corruption
is not a judicial punishment for Adam’s
guilt but is really their own because of
their participation (being one with him)
in the sinful inclination that preceded
Adam’s sinful act. Edwards’ was the
first major contribution to the long
debate about human nature in American
theology and helped set the terms of
that debate.
Edwards
perceived the threat in Taylor’s notion
of man’s innate goodness and autonomy;
the whole Christian conception of
supernatural redemption seemed to be at
stake. He therefore planned further
treatises, of which he completed two
posthumously published dissertations:
Concerning the End for Which God Created
the World and The Nature of True Virtue
(1765). God’s glory, not human
happiness, is his end in creation; but
this is because God in his
all-sufficient fullness must communicate
himself by the exercise of his
attributes. God can be said to aim at
the creature’s happiness, but it is a
happiness that consists in contemplating
and rejoicing in God’s glory manifested
in creation and redemption. Edwards
defines true virtue as disinterested
love (benevolence) toward God as Being
in general and toward all lesser beings
according to their degree of being. True
virtue, therefore, does not spring from
self-love or from any earthbound
altruism (two prime 18th-century views);
love to self, family, nation, or even
mankind is good only if these lesser
systems of being do not usurp the place
of highest regard that belongs to God
alone.
Edwards
also projected books on other subjects,
notably A History of the Work of
Redemption (he had preached a series of
sermons—posthumously published—on that
subject in 1739), which was to be a
complete theology combining biblical,
historical, and systematic materials “in
an entire new method.” Late in 1757,
however, he accepted the presidency of
the College of New Jersey (later
Princeton University) and arrived there
in January. He had hardly assumed his
duties when he contracted smallpox and
died.
Influence
Edwards’ immediate disciples, Joseph
Bellamy (pastor at Bethlehem, Conn.),
Samuel Hopkins (pastor at Great
Barrington, Mass., later at Newport,
R.I.,), and Jonathan Edwards, Jr.,
developed some of his “improvements”
into a distinct theological school; it
was first called “Hopkinsianism” and
later the “New England Theology.” These
men and their successors, in their
effort to defend Calvinism against
Arminians, Unitarians (those who denied
the doctrine of the Trinity), and
“infidels,” made important modifications
in some of its doctrines and thus
prepared the way for later 19th-century
evangelical liberalism.
Edwards’ influence on the intellectual
character of American Protestantism for
a century after his death was very
pronounced, and he was widely read in
the British Isles. In a general revolt
against Puritanism and Calvinism after
the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), Edwards’
prestige declined, and he was remembered
mainly as a hell-fire preacher or as an
abstruse, absent-minded metaphysician.
In the 1930s and after, he was
rediscovered by theologians reacting
against liberalism and by secular
scholars seeking to delineate the
“American mind.” Edwards’ ability to
combine religious intensity with
intellectual rigour and moral
earnestness, the cosmic sweep of his
theological vision, his emphasis on
faith as an “existential” response to
reality, his insistence that love is the
heart of religion, and his
uncompromising stand against all forms
of idolatry are some of the reasons his
life and writings are again being
seriously studied.
Thomas A. Schafer