Scholars widely acknowledge Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) to be the greatest thinker in the American colonial period. They spend massive amounts of time editing his works and preparing countless papers, books, articles, and dissertations about him. Christians around the world continue to publish reprints of Edwards’s works, post them to web sites, and read them for edification and instruction. There is more interest in Edwards today than there ever has been! Regrettably, even today, the one thing most people know about Edwards is that he was the author of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon included in nearly all anthologies of American literature. Edwards was a Reformed pastor and thinker whose commitments and assumptions about the Christian faith grew out of the Bible and the Augustinian tradition via the English Puritans and the Protestant Scholastics, more than from the writings of John Calvin. He spent most of his life as a pastor in Congregational churches, though his first charge, in a Presbyterian church in New York City, and his last charge, as President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) link him forever to the Presbyterian world. On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of his birth, it is fitting to devote an issue of Theology Matters to a pastor and theologian of Edwards’s stature.
Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, on October 5, 1703. He attended Yale College where he received an M.A. in 1722. For the next year he was a minister in a Presbyterian church in New York City. From 1724 to 1726, he was back at Yale as a tutor. During these years he began his extensive notebooks and personal writings. In 1726, he moved to Massachusetts to serve in the Northampton Church where his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was the pastor. Edwards married Sarah Pierpont in 1727. When Stoddard died in 1729, Edwards became the pastor, a position he held until he was dismissed from the church in 1750. Edwards became something of a celebrity in the 1730s and 1740s when his accounts of local revivals were published in the colonies and abroad. Edwards defended the revivals against critics who were unnerved by excess displays of emotion and he chastised revivalists who embraced emotional states as sure evidence of grace or who were eager to decry ministers as unconverted. Edwards saw the revivals as evidence of God’s activity in the world. He believed that history could be told from the perspective of what God had done, was doing, and would do. A change in behavior—becoming more like Christ—was the surest sign of God’s saving activity in the heart of an individual or a community.
During his long pastorate in Northampton, Edwards came into conflict with families in his congregation who gradually rejected his authority. When he tried to stiffen the requirements for full church membership and privileges, the congregation voted him out. Although he had offers from other churches, including one in Scotland, Edwards chose to move to Stockbridge, a small town and Indian mission on the western frontier of Massachusetts. During his years there, Edwards was the pastor to the settlers and Indians, a role he took with great seriousness. In 1757, Edwards was called to the presidency of the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Although he did not want to leave his great writing projects and pastoral work behind, he accepted the call as God’s will and moved to New Jersey in January 1758. Shortly after he arrived, he was inoculated for smallpox. Complications set in and, in one of the great mysteries of divine providence, he died a few weeks later on March 22. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards are buried in the Princeton Cemetery.
Edwards was hardly at Princeton long enough to establish any sort of intellectual program along the lines of his biblical, Reformed and theocentric vision. When John Witherspoon assumed the presidency of the College in 1768, he uprooted any vestiges of Edwards’s philosophical theology and established Scottish Realism as the dominant intellectual force of the school.
By the early twentieth century, Edwards was not completely ignored, but he was not associated with any major theological or philosophical movement. Following a flurry of activity around the bicentennial of his birth in 1903, interest in Edwards quickly declined and he was once again relegated to the margins of American cultural life. In a surprising turn, Edwards was read and appreciated by mainstream thinkers in the 1930s. His views of divine sovereignty, human sin, and justification by Christ alone, made sense to a generation of theologians who had grown weary of pat answers, futile hopes, and endless talk of love. This prompted something of a revival of interest in his thought and led to Harvard’s Perry Miller taking a special interest in Edwards and his unpublished manuscripts. Miller’s biography (Jonathan Edwards, 1949) created a hunger for Edwards that his book could not satisfy. Edwards needed his own voice and Miller coaxed Yale University Press into getting excited about its most famous son. Miller was the first General Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and the first volume published was Freedom of the Will in 1957. Forty-five years and twenty-two volumes later, the Yale edition continues to republish Edwards’s most famous works in critical formats, along with sermons and notebooks that have never been published before. With the completion of the Yale edition over the next few years, Edwards will finally have the monument he has deserved for so long and the church will have at its disposal all of the major writings of one of its greatest thinkers.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2003).
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