Jonathan Edwards

by George M. Marsden

"Why would anyone spend years working on a subject that has been so well covered?"

there is no recent full critical biography.

a revolution in Edwards studies, especially during the past decade, has made a full critical biography feasible i...

dwards was extraordinary. By many estimates, he was the most acute early American philosopher and the most brilliant of all American theologians.

works-Religious Affections, Freedom ofthe Will, and The Nature ofTrue Virtue-stand as masterpieces in the larger history of Christian literature.

His celebrated biography of David Brainerd was a best-selling religious text in nineteenth-century America and encouraged countless Christians to seek lives of di...

He sustained deep interests in politics and the military, especially as they bore on the international Protestant cause. In the midst of everything else, he spent much time in disciplined devotion and is sometimes most admired as a contemplative.

College of New Jersey at Princeton. Throughout

his life his experiences were shaped by his relationships to his large immedi...

In writing this life of Edwards, one of my goals has been to understand him as a real person in his own time. Bec...

My aspiration, which I am sure has been only partially realized, is to make Edwards intelligible to widely diverse audiences by first attempting to depict...

Readers might also begin by thinking about Edwards as an eighteenth-century figure and about how that context should ...

Edwards lived in a thoroughly pre-Revolutionary British province.

Clergymen in New England wielded more authority and could expect more deference to their opinions than in most other parts of the British World.

Although British people spoke much of "liberty," few had personal freedom in a modern sense.

Edwards framed his fundamental theological concerns and especially his view of history in the context of his perceptions of world wars, which he viewed as intimately linked to the prospects for the Gospel.

Edwards was loyal to the theology inherited from the seventeenth-century Puritans and their continental "Reformed," or Calvinistic, counterparts and he was pivotal in the emergence of international evangelicalism in the eighteenth century.3

Edwards anticipated some traits of later evangelicals, but the facts that he was a Calvinistic thinker, that he was rigorously intellectual, and that he was working in an eighteenth-century contex...

The central principle in Edwards' thought, true to his Calvinistic heritage, was the sovereignty of God. The triune eternally loving God, as revealed in Scripture, created and ruled everything in the universe. Most simply put, the sovereignty of God meant that if there were a question as to whether God or humans should be given credit for anything good, particularly in matters of salvation, the benefit of the doubt should always go to God. Edwards avoided allowing God's rule to be thought of as a distant abstraction, as it could become. Rather, he emphasized that God's very pur...

If the central principle of Edwards' thought was the sovereignty of God, the central practical motive in his life and work was his conviction that nothing was more momentous personally than one's eternal relationship to God. Many Christians affirm this proposition, yet most have not followed its implications for personal relationships with utter seriousness. Most who have taken it seriously have been activists rather than thinker...

For that reason I have tried to tell the story of Edwards and his family with relatively few interpretive intrusions.

He was such a multisided person and thinker that the answer to the question of what I think about him depends on the particular aspect of his life or thought we are talking about. I find him to be a person of immense personal integrity. He was intensely pious and disciplined, admirably but dauntingly so for those of more ordinary religious faith. His unrelenting intensity led him to follow the logic of his faith to its conclusions. His accompanying seriousness made him not an easy person to spend time with as a casual acquaintance, although he would have been fascinating to talk to about matters that concerned him. His prowess as a logician made him exceedingly sure of his opinions, sometimes given to pride, overconfidence, tactlessness, and an inability to credit opposing views. At the same time, he was often aware of his pride and was constantly trying-and apparently often succeeding-to subdue his arrogant spirit and to cultivate such Christian virtues as meekness, gentleness, and charity. As was common for eighteenth-century leaders, he was authoritarian, yet he was also extremely caring. He was much loved by those closest to him. His opponents found him aloof, opinionated, and intolerant. For a time he won the hearts of almost everyone in his Northampton parish; then he lost them again in a bitter dispute, a quarrel of former lovers. My assessments of his theological views are similarly varied. My interest in Edwards arises from my admiration for aspects of his theolog...

The largest theme concerns a question that has always been near the center of American experience, but one that is not well integrated into our histories. How does a religion that claims universal and exclusive truth fit into a pluralistic environment?

Seventeenth-century Puritanism in turn was in many respects closer to the world of medieval Christendom than it was to that of even nineteenth-century America. Puritanism was part of an international Calvinistic movement to reform Christendom, not to destroy it. Its goal had been to establish one pure church supported by each Christian state.

Jonathan, after an early intellectual and spiritual crisis, emerged intensely committed to demonstrating how his heritage was not only viable but the answer to all the questions posed by the new world of his day.

Edwards' life presents a particularly dramatic and influential instance of a perennial American story. Countless Americans reared in conservative religious traditions have confronted the troubling issue of how their exclusive faith should relate to a pluralistic modern American environment. That tension has been felt especially among persons in ethno-religious communities-of which the English Puritans were one of the first instances-who brought with them Old World ideals concerning the one true religion. Much of the history of religion in America has been written to emphasize the triumph of pluralism. Perhaps rightly so. That has meant, however, that those who have never conceded the premise that all or most religions, or even most Christian denominations, are more or less equal, have not been taken as seriously in our histories as they might.

Excellent point! Look at the other books in my library on relating to a pluralistic culture.

Indeed, the tensions between religious exclusivism and pluralism are among the leading unresolved issues shaping ...

Key point. How do I live that out in my senate role?

Edwards' eighteenth-century Calvinistic evangelicalism is significant not merely as an early instance of a wider phenomenon, but also because it played a prominent role in subsequent American history. After the American Revolution, New England Calvinism with a deep Edwardsian imprint emerged as one of the most influential movements shaping the new American voluntary religious culture. Edwards' grandson Timothy Dwight was an early leader of resurgent evangelical Calvinism, and Lyman Beecher, progenitor of the famous Beecher family, was one of Dwight's most effective lieutenants. New England Congregationalists and their Presbyterian allies carried the evangelical Calvinist campaigns into the upper "west" (now upper Midwest). By the i83os their voluntary organizations for missions, evangelism, and reform had combined budgets larger than that of the federal government. Before the Civil War these heirs to the now-contested Edwardsian heritage or their near counterparts controlled most of the nation's leading colleges, including the state "universities." They were leaders in the reform movements, including temperance and antislavery, and were leading figures in the moral reform wing of the Whig Party and then in Republicanism.

Amazing what a movement can do to impact the culture!

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable since Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses.7 Most strikingly, the standard narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity flourished in American and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports. The particularities of Edwards' life-so different in many ways from what followed-do not explain all that, even if they shed light on it. Nonetheless, the larger point is that histories of America-or of the modern world for that matter-need to integrate people like Edwards into their accounts.

Edwards is, after all, most important as a figure in the history of Christianity.

Even his family letters seldom deal with personal matters outside of a theological framework. That underscores the point that for Edwards one cannot draw a line between his theological or ecclesiastical roles and the person in some more essential sense. Edwards' roles were so integrated in his life that they were basic to who he was.

od accompanied his blessings with warnings of his judgments. Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the river town of Northampton, Massachusetts, knew that well and preached it often. Although he was the most renowned man in the promising valley of the Connecticut River, he knew that no mortal could guarantee the survival of the English on this beleaguered frontier.

Many of them looked more like armed garrisons, especially from Northampton north to Deerfield, the region mos...

Stoddard was a large, impressive man and a powerful preacher famed for speaking without notes.

On May 26, 1703, election day, Stoddard preached "before his excellency, the governour, the honoured Council and Assembly," and his fellow clergy on "The way for a People to Live Long in the Land that God hath Given Them."

Britain and Ireland." In New England, heirs to the Puritans knew that their liberty and their destiny as a people depended on the triumph of the Protestant cause. War with France also renewed the more immediate deadly threat of Indian attacks on the colonial frontiers. The New Englanders' most conspicuous failure was their relationship to the natives they were displacing. King Philip's War of 1675-76, the most destructive war in losses per capita in American history, ended early hopes for peaceful relations and successful missions. Many of the surviving Indians were driven into the arms of the French and-worse-their Jesuit missionaries.

In this wartime setting Stoddard's message to the royal governor and the Massachusetts legislators was what would become classic advice from the American west: keep taxes low and defenses strong. "Do not lay unnecessary burdens on the people, yet be willing to expend what is necessary."

The far deeper problem, Stoddard declared, was moral and spiritual. God was punishing New England because its people violated his commandments. The evidence was clear. "God has had a great controversy with the country for many years," Stoddard warned in familiar terms. Stoddard, who could have been a businessman himself, had calculated the economic consequences of God's judgments: "I do judge that a third part of that income, that the country had or might with an ordinary blessing have had, has been taken away by the judgeme...

Stoddard believed that God had brought this people to this promising land with an eternal purpose. God had designed all their earthly blessings and punishments, promises and warnings, to teach them of their need for a higher citizenship, to accept God's free gift of an eternal kingdom. New Englanders should thank God for their temporal blessings, yet they must always bear in mind that they were no better than the people of Old Testament Israel. God, like a loving father, taught th...

The attack on Deerfield-to New Englanders, a terrorist massacre of innocents (even if the displaced Indians saw it as a justified act of war)-was the defining event of the era, especially for families of the victims, such as the Stoddards.13

The family gathered for prayers several times a day. In their repeated entreaties he learned not only of distant conflicts, but also that the encounters were not simply among the English, the French, and their Indian allies. The real war was among spiritual powers,

Retellings of the Deerfield massacre vividly reinforced this understanding of the cosmic significance of the international struggles.

while Timothy Edwards was unquestionably the head of the household, Jonathan was growing up in a home that was, practically speaking, a world of women.

We can only speculate as to what effect living in such a feminine environment had on Jonathan.

Jonathan Edwards is sometimes criticized for having too dim a view of human nature, but it may be helpful to be reminded that his grandmother was an incorrigible profligate, his great-aunt committed infanticide, and his great-uncle was an ax-murderer.

For months the nine-year-old was a model of sanctity. He prayed secretly five times a day, spoke much of religion to other boys, and organized prayer meetings with them.

He and his schoolmates "built a

booth in a swamp, in a very secret and retired place, for a place of prayer." He also had his own secret places in the woods where he would retire "and u...

Timothy Edwards, following Puritan precedents, emphasized three principal steps toward true conversion. First was "conviction" or "an awakening sense of a person's sad estate with reference to eternity."3

An "awakening" was no guarantee of salvation.