Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

A philosopher, theologian, revivalist preacher, and missionary, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most brilliant, influential, and controversial figures of British colonial America and evangelical Christianity. Widely considered America’s greatest theologian, Edwards played a pivotal role in the Great Awakening, the religious revivalist movement that swept the English colonies from Maine to Georgia in the 1730s and 1740s. While Edwards’s Calvinist theology reflects the conservative New England Puritan tradition of his forefathers, his writings display the important influence of British Enlightenment thinkers, particularly the empirical philosophy of John Locke and Isaac Newton’s mechanistic physics. Edwards’s popularization of the New England revivals, his groundbreaking synthesis of Newtonian science, Lockean epistemology, and Calvinist theology, his bestselling accounts of the phenomena and proofs of spiritual conversion, his theological analyses of the Christian doctrines of redemption, grace, original sin, virtue, and human freedom, and his religious aesthetics secured for him an enduring legacy within the history of American literature and modern evangelicalism.

Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, Edwards was the only son of the Reverend Timothy Edwards, the town pastor, and Esther Stoddard Edwards, daughter of the renowned New England divine Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards was destined for the ministry from a young age; his extended family boasted influential clergymen of Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, and his maternal grandfather, whose pulpit Edwards was eventually to inherit, was popularly known as the “Pope of the Connecticut Valley” in recognition of his preeminence among the region’s clergy. A studious and reverent child, Edwards displayed precocious powers of observation and literary exposition in early essays on nature. In 1716, at the age of 13, he entered the newly founded Yale College, where he enthusiastically read the works of Isaac Newton and John Locke. Graduating in 1720, he remained at New Haven to study theology, earning his master’s degree in 1723. During his late teen years, Edwards experienced a spiritual awakening, which he later described as a sense of sweet delight in God’s absolute sovereignty and unlimited freedom to choose those destined for salvation or hell, a doctrine Edwards had strenuously resisted as a boy. While engaged in his graduate studies, Edwards briefly served as interim pastor for a Presbyterian church in New York City. A year after completing his formal studies, he accepted a position as a tutor at Yale following the removal of the college rector, whose defection to Anglicanism had scandalized the institution. While senior tutor at Yale, Edwards courted Sarah Pierpont, six years his junior, whom he married in 1727.

In 1726, Edwards accepted the position of assistant minister in his grandfather’s church in Northampton. Upon Stoddard’s death in 1729, Edwards became pastor, and he remained in Northampton for the next 20 years, ministering to a growing congregation, leading revivals, delivering brilliant sermons, and writing important books on redemption theology and the nature of genuine religious experience. In 1751, Edwards accepted the position of missionary and tutor to the Mahican settlement in Stockbridge, a frontier hamlet in Western Massachusetts, where over the next six years he completed several important theological treatises, developing and refining ideas he had sketched out in extensive notebook entries compiled since his days at Yale. In 1757, Edwards was nominated by the overseers of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, to succeed his son-in-law, Aaron Burr, Sr., as president of the school. A few months after reluctantly accepting the position, Edwards died from complications following smallpox inoculation, on March 22, 1758.

Edwards was a masterful prose stylist and a perceptive, insightful observer of human psychology and nature; his voluminous literary output spans the genres of diary, memoir, sermon, philosophical and theological treatise, naturalist essay, sociological documentation, biblical commentary, biography, and sacred history. During the latter half of his life and in the decades following his death, Edwards’s reputation and influence spread from colonial New England to Europe; his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections and biography of the young missionary David Brainerd were bestsellers during the 19th century, inspiring thousands of Christian evangelicals and serving as manuals for revivalists and missionaries on both continents. With the rise of Unitarianism as a cultural force in America after the Civil War, however, Edwards’s favor fell, and he was dismissed as an antiquated relic of the Puritan past. His standing within the American intellectual tradition was restored in the latter half of the 20th century, largely as a result of the historian Perry Miller’s acclaimed biography of Edwards, published in 1949.

Source: Gura, Philip F., editor. “Chronology.” Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening, Library of America, 2013, pp. 699-719.