Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), American theologian and Congregational clergyman, whose sermons stirred the religious revival called the Great Awakening.

Born October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut Colony, Edwards was a child prodigy, writing an essay on the nature of the soul at the age of ten. At 13 he entered the Collegiate School of Connecticut (now Yale University). He was ordained in 1727 and received a call to assist his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts Bay Colony.

When Edwards was 26, his grandfather died, and the young man became pastor at Northampton. In 1731, in Boston, Edwards preached his first public attack on Arminianism, then popular in New England, and, in a sermon entitled “God Glorified in Man's Dependence”, called for a return to rigorous Calvinism. Three years later he delivered a series of powerful sermons on the same subject.

The result of his sermons was a religious revival in which a great number of conversions were made; Edwards received 300 new members into his church. In 1740 the British evangelist George Whitefield visited Edwards. Together, the two men started the Great Awakening which developed into a religious frenzy engulfing all New England. By 1742 the revival movement had grown out of control, and for the next 60 to 70 years it prevented any liberal interpretation of doctrine in America.

In Northampton, Edwards's sermons created a demand for sterner religious discipline. Eventually, however, his congregation turned against him. He instituted disciplinary proceedings in church against young people who had been reading what he considered improper books; later, he objected strongly to the Halfway Covenant, a New England Church custom that permitted baptized people to have all the privileges of Church membership except communion although they had not openly professed conversion. A council dismissed Edwards in 1750. The following year he received a call to Stockbridge, in Massachusetts, where he became pastor and missionary to the Housatonic people. In Stockbridge, he wrote his most important theological works. Among them was A Careful and Strict Enquiry into ... Notions of ... Freedom of Will ... (1754), in which he denied that human beings have self-determined will; it remains one of the most famous theological works ever written in America.

In 1757, Edwards accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). He was inaugurated in 1758, but five weeks later, on March 22, 1758, he died as the result of an inoculation against smallpox, which was then epidemic. Among his other works are A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (1754), and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758).