Jonathan Edwards

by George M. Marsden

Timothy Edwards, like the vast majority of New England's preachers, was convinced he must not flinch from warning sinners of the dangers of falling into unending hellish tortures.

To benefit from these awful warnings sinners had to reach the second step toward true conversion, which was humiliation.

Only then was one sufficiently prepared to reach the third step-if God graciously granted it-of receiving God's regenerating "light," or a "new spirit created in them,"

Timothy Edwards required prospective communicant church members to give a public profession of their experience, which would follow this essential pattern.9

One sign of being on the road to conversion was to strive fervently to keep God's law, but it was only when sinners came to realize their total inability to succeed in keeping that law that they would be prepared truly to depend on God's grace. Seldom has there been a spiritual discipline where so much effort was put into recognizing the worthlessness of one's own efforts.

Despite their doctrines of grace, New England Calvinists, such as the Edwardses, worked constantly at trying to regulate their own lives and those of others by God's law.

The law was a "schoolmaster" showing how far

short of fulfilling God's covenant one's...

Although Puritans aspired to make all of life a ritual of obedience to God's commands, they drastically reduced the formal rituals of the church. Rigorously following the principle that "the Bible alone" should guide Christian life and worship, they ...

First, it was too hard to tell exactly who was converted. The external church would never be perfectly coextensive with the body of believers anyway. Second, the Lord's Supper was a means of grace, so that opening it to sincere upright people might foster their

conversions. Stoddard, a proven champion of revival in Northampton, insisted that the sacrament itself could be "a converting ordinance."

New Englanders took their sacraments seriously. At communion services New England pastors read the warning text (I Corinthians 11:29): "For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body." Partaking unworthily could imperil one's soul. Many laypeople, even when urged to become communicants by their pastors, refused to do so on the ground that they feared they might not be truly converted.19

Timothy Edwards was caught in the middle of all this.

Even after his boyish religious experience proved ephemeral, Jonathan remained fascinated by the eternally momentous question of conversion.

The East Windsor awakening was more than an ordinary event.

Timothy Edwards was also a disciplinarian who set high standards for everyone. His reputation for learning was based on his library that contained many spiritual classics, on his mastery of Scripture, and on being a skilled teacher of the classics who successfully prepared a number of the boys of the town for college.

He also followed the custom of reinforcing community standards by bringing notorious violators before the congregation where they were publicly shamed as he read their con- fessions.34

In later years Timothy Edwards enjoyed other revivals, but he also sometimes saw his relationship with the town deteriorate into bitter antagonisms-once again setting a course his son would follow.3s

In matters academic the two were ...

Far more difficult for Jonathan was meeting the high standards his father set for true spirituality. No amount of discipline and striving could satisfy. For a boy who took great satisfaction in his own superior standing and achievements, ...

His next years would be spiritual...

In the fall of that year, just as he was turning thirteen, Jonathan left ...

By Jonathan's third year, in 1718, New Haven was beginning to prevail in the complex rivalries among Connecticut's regions as the future location of the Collegiate School. Cotton Mather, a tireless friend of the Connecticut college ever since Harvard had fallen out of the Mathers' control in 1701, had recently secured a gift from the English merchant Elihu Yale.

renaming the college for Yale,

and he would graduate as the valedictorian of his class; yet something even more important was going on in his spiritual life. During his senior year he fell deathly ill with pleurisy; he was not prepared to die and was terrified. As he later recalled, it was as though God "shook me over the pit of hell." Having peered over the edge of the abyss, Jonathan resolved to give himself up to God and for a time had the delight of believing himself reconciled to God. Soon after his recovery, however, the same thing happened as after his childhood experience, he "fell again into my old ways of sin."38 Self-discipline had failed as much as it had succeeded.

Holiness seemed "a melancholy, morose, sour and unpleasant thing."39 He did not find delight in lengthy church services. He still had a rebellious nature. He was proud.

The sixteen-year-old returned to his old ways, but this time God would not let him go and ...

the next year to read for a M.A. degree. It was a time of immense intellectual growth, yet once again that was overshadowed by intense spirit...

Further distressing him were his personal relationships to other students. Although adults lauded his intellectual achievements, that did not ...

Jonathan's alienation from his fellow students and his revulsion at their escapades can be better understood if we recognize that he was undergoing the most intense spiritual journey of his life. He was living like a young monk seeking sainthood in a school of rowdy boys. By March 1, 1721, the date he was reporting on the college shenanigans, he was on the verge of, or

perhaps already in the midst of, discovering some of the marvels that he would eventually recognize as the essence of his conversion.45

like a great artist, he was exploring dimensions of reality that were beyond the imagination of most of his peers.

While one part of him was powerfully drawn toward full commitment, another part stiffly resisted. The resistance built its bastion in his intellect. Since childhood, as he later depicted it, he had been "full of objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he please; leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me."46

His resourceful intellect provided a powerful weapon for this resistance.

His heart and his intellect were not separable in this quest. His reason and his moral sensibilities had put a huge obstacle in his path. These objections were manifestations of a rebelliousness against the orthodoxy of his parents, dating to his childhood. He could not believe in God's total sovereignty, the doctrine at the very foundation of Calvinist teaching. Yet he was sure also that he had no hope on his own. What good would it do him if"he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul" (Matthew 16:26)? Earth's pleasures were fleeting and would turn to dust. Even if he thought it was repulsively unfair, he deeply feared that the fires of hell awaited those who rebelled against God.47 He desperately wanted to trust in God, yet he could not believe in, let alone submit to, such a tyrant. In the midst of this turmoil, he had a breakthrough.

Attributing all to God's grace, as he did in his later narrative, Edwards played down the extent to which his reasoning had been crucial in reconciling himself to his heritage.

This intellectual breakthrough later seemed the work of the Holy Spirit because it soon had an overwhelming spiritual manifestation. At first Jonathan's mind simply "rested" in his insights, "and it put an end to all those cavils and objections, that I had till then abode with me, all the preceding part of my life." Then one day came a wondrous response, far beyond what his intellect could produce. He was reading I Timothy 1:17,

Even so, the introspective and keenly observant young man remained deeply suspicious of his own affections, having been twice fooled by what had seemed like the strongest spiritual emotions that disappeared when the crisis was past. So he added immediately to the above account the remarkable observation "But it never came into my thought, that there was anything spiritual, or of a saving nature in this."

This time was different. The new sensibilities grew during the spring.

wandered in the fields, woods, and hills near New Haven for his meditations he repeatedly saw the glory and beauty of God's love in Christ. He experienced an "inward sweet sense" of Christ's love expressed in "the wor...

One might think, from this account, written almost twenty years later, that Jonathan lived happily ever after, enraptured in God's love and enthralled by God's glory. He described himself as often lost in contemplations of nature. Before his spiritual transformation, he noted, he had been "uncommonly terrified" by thunderstorms; afterward they inspired "sweet and glorious contemplations of my great and glorious God."

True, once he experienced these ecstasies his life would never be the same. The

exhilaration of having encountered the light of God's love, being enthralled by the beauty of Christ, and being filled by "an infinite fountain of divine glory and sweet...

That becomes apparent, as we shall soon see, from reading his private spiritual diary, in which he confided during his early years as a spiritual pilgrim. In the "Personal Narrative" he was writing

and for the first time he was seriously confronted with the realities of another faith. As he later recalled, "I once lived for many months next to a Jew (the houses adjoining one to another) and had much opportunity daily to observe him; who appeared to me the devoutest person that ever I saw in my life; great part of his time

being spent in acts of devotion, at his eastern window, which opened next to mine, seeming to be most earnestly engaged, not only in the daytime, but sometimes whole nights."'

Living near the docks in this seaport town enhanced Jonathan's keen interest in world affairs. As with everything else, he saw world events as merely outward signs of spiritual realities, of what God was doing through human history.

Probably in late fall 1722, perhaps in response to the difficulties in sustaining high levels of spiritual intensity, Jonathan undertook the Puritan practice of framing a set of resolutions to discipline himself, adding new entries as needed. Shortly later, in December 1722, he also started a spiritual diary, which he kept fairly regularly at first and then sporadically over the next three years. These documents are worth careful scrutiny because they are almost the only sources from his entire career that provide a direct window into Edwards' interior life.11

Jonathan directed his "Resolutions" toward plugging every gap that would allow distraction from what he saw as his only worthy activity, to glorify God.

he determined "never to do any manner of thing, whether in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God; nor be, nor suffer it, if I can avoid it."