Jonathan Edwards

by George M. Marsden

Many of the resolutions are directed toward trying never to lose focu...

He resolved "to maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking." On this he was constantly experimenting with himself, seeing how much he needed to eat out of necessity and avoiding all excesses that would dull his mind or rouse his passions. Throughout his life observers commented on his strict eating habits and often em...

True to his Puritan heritage, he often came back to...

Most of the specifically practical

resolutions have to do, however, with correcting personal faults, especially irritability, pride, and evil-speaking.

Edwards was desperately trying to keep God in the forefront of his

consciousness.

Edwards literally kept score of how well he did or, as he would put it, of the ...

days." In his diary he also kept track of his spiritu...

The mature Edwards looked back on this rigor as involving "too great a dependence on my own strength; which afterwards proved a great damage to me."15 Yet he never abandoned his belief in the value of strict spiritual disciplines, as his later Life ofDavid Brainerd would reveal. His theological explanation in his "Personal Narrative" for the difference between his early and his mature experiences as a convert was that he now had "a more full and constant sense of the absolute sovereignty of God, and a delight in that sovereignty;

In the winter of 1723 in New York, Jonathan must have appeared as an extraordinarily pious and intense young man to his parishioners in his little Presbyterian congregation. They could not but feel the power of his penetrating intellect. His carefully memorized sermons already had the relentless quality that characterized his later preaching.

Constantly he reminded his hearers of the inversion of values that Christianity involves. They must be renouncing all worldly ambitions and counting as gain only time spent in devotion and service to God.

The sermon Jesus Christ the Light of the World is a gem of...

As spring was reaching its height in late April 1723 (early May by our modern calendars, which add eleven days), Jonathan reluctantly had to leave New York. Timothy Edwards was trying to get his son back to Connecticut and more under his wing. The previous fall Timothy had engineered a call for Jonathan to be pastor of the village of Bolton, Connecticut,

Leaving his friends in New York was one of the most bittersweet moments in his life.

Yet his spirituality was marked by bright peaks and dismal valleys, and Jonathan himself kept coming back to the possibility that his parents might be right.22

Apparently the dispute involved Timothy Edwards' emphasis on a preparatory step toward conversion that some Puritans had described as the experience of "legal terrors."

One had to be so overcome by one's sinfulness as to experience the terror of total "humiliation" before knowing ...

Whatever the exact details of the dispute, both parents were involved and i...

Jonathan resolved to show proper deference to his parents and to endure wrongful suffering. Yet Jonathan...

he was determining to be more thoroughly prepared with knowledge of Scripture, the one authority that could trump Puritan divines. He also privately "resolved, never to leave searching, till I have ...

Out of his disconcerting religious struggles-which were by no means over-arose one of the major agendas of his later career. How could one tell the difference ...

That question touched him at the center...

Yet for the young Jonathan it was only one part of a far larger design that he was already drafting to redire...

the nineteen-year-old Jonathan was laying out a monumental design. At the same time that he was pursuing his spiritual goals with such intensity he was organizing his views on everything. To do this, he began what would beco...

In New York he began a notebook of "M...

By the end of 1723 he had added three more notebooks: "Notes on the Apocalypse," "Notes on Scripture," and "The Mind."1 The pastorate was his calling, yet he was resolved that his life's work would not be just local. He was determined to be an international figure. This was part ambition-of which he had a lot-yet he also saw it as his larger calling, if God granted him the grace, ...

to display modesty of style and to try to gain readers rather than t...

Jonathan never traveled widely, yet he saw himself in the midst of an international upheaval of immense significance.