Jonathan Edwards (theologian)

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was an American preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian. He is considered a major and original figure in American philosophical theology. His theological ideas are broad but draw from the Puritan tradition found in the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith. More recent scholarship highlights how his life’s work was built on ideas of beauty, harmony, and ethical fitness, and how much the Enlightenment shaped his thinking. Edwards was a key figure in the First Great Awakening and led some of the earliest revivals from 1733 to 1735 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. His work led to the development of New England theology.

In 1741, during a revival in Enfield, Connecticut, Edwards preached the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” now a classic of early American literature, which came after George Whitefield’s tour of the colonies. He is famous for books like *The End for Which God Created the World*, *The Life of David Brainerd*—which inspired many 19th-century missionaries—and *Religious Affections*, still read by Calvinist Evangelicals. Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after becoming president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton.

**Early life**

Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, the fifth of eleven children and the only son of Timothy Edwards, a minister in East Windsor, Connecticut (now South Windsor), who earned extra money tutoring boys for college. His mother, Esther Stoddard, was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts, and was considered unusually intelligent and independent. Timothy Edwards owned at least one enslaved black man named Ansars. Jonathan was prepared for college by his father and older sisters, all of whom had excellent educations. His eldest sister, Esther, wrote a semi-humorous tract on the immateriality of the soul often wrongly attributed to Jonathan.

He entered Yale College in 1716, just before turning 13. The next year, he encountered John Locke’s *Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, which deeply influenced him. During college, he kept notebooks titled “The Mind,” “Natural Science” (which included a discussion of atomic theory), “The Scriptures,” and “Miscellanies,” and planned a major work on natural and mental philosophy, drafting rules for it. He was interested in natural history; at age 11, he observed and wrote an essay on the ballooning behavior of spiders. He later edited this text to fit the scientific literature of the time, and his “The Flying Spider” was accepted into contemporary spider scholarship. After graduating from Yale, he studied theology for two years but kept his interest in science. While many European scientists and American clergy saw science as leading to deism, Edwards believed nature showed God’s masterful design. He often prayed and worshipped in the woods, finding beauty and solace there.

Edwards was fascinated by Isaac Newton’s discoveries and other scientists of the era. Before becoming a full-time pastor in Northampton, he wrote on natural philosophy topics like light and optics, in addition to spiders. He worried about contemporaries who focused on materialism and reason alone, but he saw the laws of nature as coming from God and showing his wisdom and care. His sermons and theological works stress God’s beauty and the role of aesthetics in spiritual life. He is thought to foreshadow a 20th-century movement in theological aesthetics, led by figures like Hans Urs von Balthasar.

From 1722 to 1723, he served for eight months as an unordained supply pastor at a small Presbyterian church on William Street in New York City. The church asked him to stay, but he declined. After two months of study at home, from 1724 to 1726, he was one of two tutors at Yale, running the college because there was no rector. The previous rector, Timothy Cutler, had lost his position after converting to the Anglican Church, and no replacement had been found after two years.

He partly recorded the years 1720 to 1726 in his diary and in a set of resolutions for his conduct. He had long sought salvation and was unsure of his own conversion until his last year in college, when he stopped feeling that the election of some to salvation and others to damnation was “a horrible doctrine” and instead found it “exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet.” He then took great joy in nature’s beauties and delighted in allegorical readings of the Song of Solomon. Balancing these mystical joys was the stern tone of his *Resolutions*, where he was almost ascetic in his desire to live earnestly and soberly, waste no time, and keep strict temperance in eating and drinking.

On February 15, 1727, Edwards was ordained as minister at Northampton, serving as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, a well-known minister. He was a scholar-pastor, not a visiting one, and studied 13 hours a day. That same year, he married Sarah Pierpont, then 17. Sarah came from a prominent New England clerical family: her father, James Pierpont, was a founder of Yale College, and her mother was the granddaughter of a notable figure.