Who Was Jonathan Edwards? Pastor, Revival Leader and Theologian
Jonathan Edwards was an American pastor and theologian who lived from 1703 to 1758. He served a church in Northampton, Massachusetts, for over twenty years, and he was one of the leaders of the revivals called the Great Awakening. He preached the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and he wrote books on revival, true religion, the human will and Christian love that are still studied today. Many count him the greatest theologian America has produced.
That's the short answer. Here is a fuller look at his life, what he taught, and where to begin reading him.
A boy in a parsonage
Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut. His father, Timothy Edwards, was the town's pastor. His mother, Esther, was a daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the powerful minister of Northampton. Jonathan was the only son in a family of ten daughters.
He was a serious and gifted child. His editor H. Norman Gardiner, in the introduction to Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, tells how as a boy he built a booth in a swamp with friends as a place of secret prayer, and how at about twelve he wrote a careful paper on the habits of the "flying spider."
He entered Yale College at about thirteen and graduated in 1720. He stayed on to study theology, served briefly as a pastor to a small congregation in New York City, and then returned to Yale as a tutor.
Conversion and the Resolutions
During these years Edwards came to a new sense of God that changed his whole outlook. He later wrote it down. It began as he read 1 Timothy 1:17, "Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever." He wrote:
There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being, a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before.
A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, An Account of His Conversion
At about the same time he wrote out his Resolutions, a list of rules for his life that he read over each week. One of the best known is short:
Resolved, To live with all my might, while I do live.
A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Extracts from His Private Writings
Both the account of his conversion and the Resolutions are printed in the life of Edwards that opens our edition of Religious Affections. We've gathered more lines like these in Jonathan Edwards quotes.
Northampton
In the late 1720s Edwards went to Northampton to assist his grandfather Stoddard. In 1727 he married Sarah Pierpont of New Haven, a young woman known for her own deep devotion. They had eleven children. When Stoddard died in 1729, Edwards became the sole pastor of one of the largest churches in New England.
He was not a showy preacher. He usually read from a manuscript and used few gestures. But his sermons were carefully reasoned and deeply felt, and he expected them to reach the heart.
In 1734 and 1735 a revival broke out in Northampton. Edwards described it in a long letter that became A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. He wrote that "the town seemed to be full of the presence of God":
There was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.
Edwards on Revivals, A Faithful Narrative, Introductory Statement
The narrative was printed in London and Boston and read widely on both sides of the Atlantic. It made Edwards known far beyond his town.
The Great Awakening
A few years later a much wider revival swept the colonies. George Whitefield preached through New England in 1740, and Edwards welcomed him to Northampton. In July 1741 Edwards preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, Connecticut. Accounts say the hearers cried out so loudly that he could not finish. You can read the whole sermon and see that it is a plea to flee to Christ while the door of mercy is open.
The Awakening also brought excesses, and critics attacked the whole movement. Edwards defended it as a true work of God while warning against spiritual pride, wild impressions and harsh judging of others. His Thoughts on the Revival in New England did both. Then in Religious Affections he wrote his most careful answer to the question of how to tell true religion from false. His answer was that real grace moves the heart, rests on light and truth, and shows itself above all in a holy life.
Dismissed by his church
In the 1740s Edwards came to believe that only those who made a credible profession of faith should come to the Lord's Supper. His grandfather had taught otherwise, and the town had followed Stoddard's practice for decades. The dispute grew bitter, and in 1750 the church voted to dismiss him.
His Farewell Sermon is calm and without bitterness. He appealed to the day when pastor and people will meet again before Christ's judgment seat. Gardiner called it "virtually the Apologia of his ministerial life."
Stockbridge and Princeton
In 1751 Edwards moved his family to Stockbridge, a frontier village in western Massachusetts. There he served as missionary to the Mohican Indians and pastor of a small English congregation. These quiet years were his most productive as a writer. There he finished Freedom of the Will, published in 1754, and wrote his defense of the doctrine of original sin and other treatises.
Early in 1758 he became president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. Weeks after taking office he received a smallpox inoculation, a new practice at the time. He developed the disease and died on March 22, 1758, at fifty-four.
What Edwards taught
Edwards was a Calvinist who held firmly to the sovereignty of God in salvation. His first published sermon, God Glorified in Man's Dependence, argues that the redeemed depend on God for everything, and that God Himself is their highest good:
The redeemed have all their good in God. We not only have it of him, and through him, but it consists in him; he is all our good.
Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, God Glorified in Man's Dependence
But he never made religion a matter of the head alone. His great theme is that the Holy Spirit gives a new sense of the beauty of God. In A Divine and Supernatural Light he puts it this way:
There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.
Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light
That is why he could preach on hell with terrible plainness and on heaven with great tenderness. In Charity and Its Fruits he calls heaven "a world of charity or love."
Why he's still read
Edwards joined a fine mind to a warm heart. Philosophers still argue over Freedom of the Will. Pastors still use Religious Affections to weigh revival and their own souls. And ordinary Christians still find in his sermons a vision of God that is both awesome and lovely.
Where to start
Start with Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards. It has seven sermons, Gardiner's helpful introduction to his life, and the Enfield sermon read whole. Then read Charity and Its Fruits for his practical teaching on love, and Edwards on Revivals for his eyewitness account of the awakenings. When you're ready for something harder, go on to Religious Affections. Our guide to Jonathan Edwards books describes all ten in the library, and they're listed together on his author page.