Person

Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was a New England pastor, revival preacher, theologian and philosopher, widely regarded as the most important theologian America has produced. He was a central figure in the First Great Awakening, the author of the best-known sermon in American history (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 1741), the classic Reformed defender of compatibilist freedom (Freedom of the Will, 1754), and the author of the most careful Protestant treatment of how to tell genuine spiritual experience from counterfeit (Religious Affections, 1746). He died weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, from a smallpox inoculation. For apologetics he matters twice over: as a rigorous philosophical theologian on freedom and divine sovereignty, and as the great discerner of revival.

Biographical sketch

Born October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son among eleven children of the Rev. Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards.
Education. Entered Yale College before he turned thirteen, graduated in 1720, and stayed for graduate theological study; served briefly as pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in New York (1722-1723) and as a tutor at Yale. As a young man he recorded his conversion and his sense of the beauty and sovereignty of God in what became his Personal Narrative, and wrote his Resolutions.
Northampton (1726-1750). Called in 1726 as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, the most influential minister in western Massachusetts; became sole pastor on Stoddard's death in 1729. Married Sarah Pierpont in 1727; they had eleven children.
Revival. A local awakening in Northampton in 1734-1735 was described in his A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), widely read in Britain and America. The larger First Great Awakening followed in 1740-1742, when George Whitefield's preaching tour swept the colonies; Whitefield preached in Edwards' pulpit in October 1740.
Dismissal. In 1750 the Northampton congregation voted him out after he reversed Stoddard's practice of admitting to the Lord's Supper people who made no profession of saving faith. He insisted that communicant membership required a credible profession of conversion.
Stockbridge (1751-1757). Served as pastor to a small English congregation and missionary to the Mohican and Mohawk people on the Massachusetts frontier. In this remote post he wrote his major treatises: Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), and the two dissertations The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue (published posthumously in 1765).
Princeton and death. Elected president of the College of New Jersey in 1757 after the death of his son-in-law Aaron Burr Sr., he took office in early 1758. Smallpox was threatening Princeton, and Edwards, a supporter of the still-controversial practice, was inoculated. He developed a severe infection and died on March 22, 1758, aged fifty-four.

A hard fact belongs in any honest account: like many New England ministers of his time, Edwards owned enslaved people, and though he criticized the transatlantic slave trade, he defended the ownership of slaves. His son Jonathan Edwards Jr. and his student Samuel Hopkins became prominent early opponents of slavery, using arguments from the elder Edwards' own theology of true virtue and benevolence.

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The Great Awakening and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Edwards preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741, at the height of the Awakening. The text was Deuteronomy 32:35:

Vengeance is mine, and recompense, At the time when their foot shall slide: For the day of their calamity is at hand, And the things that are to come upon them shall make haste. (Deuteronomy 32:35, ASV)

In summary, the sermon argues that unconverted sinners stand at every moment over the pit of judgment, held back from falling only by the mere pleasure of God; that nothing in their own strength, health or plans secures them for a single hour; and that God's patience, not their safety, is the only reason they have not already fallen. Its most famous image compares the sinner to a spider or loathsome insect held over a fire. Eyewitnesses reported that the congregation broke into cries and groans before the sermon was finished, so that Edwards had to pause.

Two points are commonly missed:

The sermon ends in invitation, not despair. Its final section urges hearers that the door of mercy now stands open in Christ and that this is a day of extraordinary grace in which multitudes are coming to him. The terror is meant to drive the hearer to Christ.
It is not typical of Edwards' preaching. Edwards' surviving sermons are dominated by the beauty, excellency and love of God and the sweetness of Christ. The sermon became famous in part because it was reprinted for generations in school anthologies as a specimen of Puritan severity.

For the doctrine behind the sermon, see Hell and Eternal Punishment.

Freedom of the Will (1754)

The full title is A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. It is Edwards' answer to the Arminian claim that moral responsibility requires a will with a self-determining power, able to choose otherwise under identical prior conditions (what is now called Libertarian Free Will).

Its main arguments, in summary:

The will is the mind choosing. The will is not a separate faculty that sits above a person's desires; it is the mind choosing, and it always chooses according to what appears most agreeable to the mind at the moment of choice, that is, according to the strongest motive.
Freedom is the power to do as one pleases. A person is free when nothing outside him prevents him from acting on his own choice. That is the freedom ordinary people mean, and the freedom moral responsibility requires.
Self-determination leads to a regress. If every free choice must be caused by a prior free choice of the will, the chain never begins. If a choice is caused by nothing, it is mere chance, and a chance event is not something a person can be praised or blamed for.
Natural versus moral ability. Edwards distinguished natural inability (a lack of capacity, as when a man in chains cannot walk) from moral inability (a settled lack of inclination, as when a man cannot bring himself to betray a friend). Sinners have the natural ability to come to Christ but lack the moral ability, because they do not want to. Moral inability excuses no one, since it consists precisely in the sinner's own wicked will. This is how Edwards reconciled human responsibility with John 6:44 ("No man can come to me, except the Father that sent me draw him").
Divine foreknowledge and necessity. God's infallible foreknowledge of human choices shows that those choices are certain, and certainty of this kind is fully compatible with their being free in the sense that matters.

The book became the standard Reformed defense of Compatibilism and remains a set text in philosophy of religion. It is the classic statement of the view that God's sovereign grace and real human responsibility do not compete: "it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13, ASV). See Calvinism, Monergism, Free Will and Determinism and Calvinism vs Arminianism vs Molinism vs Open Theism.

His later treatise Original Sin (1758) defended the doctrine of inherited corruption against the Enlightenment moralist John Taylor, arguing from the universal fact of human sin to a common corrupt nature, and developed a distinctive account of humanity's identity with Adam that drew on his view that God continually upholds created things in being. See Original Sin.

Religious Affections (1746): discerning true revival

The Great Awakening produced both genuine conversions and wild excess: shrieking, fainting, visions, impulses claimed as direct revelation, and itinerants who denounced settled ministers as unconverted. Critics such as Charles Chauncy of Boston dismissed the whole revival as emotional enthusiasm. Enthusiasts treated every strong feeling as the Spirit. Edwards rejected both.

He first set out tests in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), a sermon-treatise on 1 John 4:1, "believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God." His mature answer came in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), whose central thesis is that true religion consists in great part in holy affections: not cold assent, and not raw emotion, but the whole soul's love for God and delight in his holiness.

The book is built in two lists:

Signs that prove nothing either way. Edwards lists twelve marks that neither confirm nor disprove genuine grace: that affections are very intense; that they have strong bodily effects; that they make a person talk fluently about religion; that they come into the mind unbidden; that they come with texts of Scripture suddenly brought to mind; that the person has confident assurance; that they make a person zealous in outward religious duty; and so on. Strong experiences can come from the Spirit, from nature or from the devil, so their intensity settles nothing.
Twelve distinguishing signs of gracious affections. Among them: they arise from a real divine and supernatural influence on the heart; their object is the moral excellency and beauty of God for its own sake, not first the believer's own benefit; they bring humility, not spiritual pride; they produce a change of nature; they bear the meek, loving spirit of Christ; and above all, the twelfth sign, they issue in consistent Christian practice. Edwards calls practice the chief of all the signs, both to others and to the believer's own conscience, building on Matthew 7:16: "By their fruits ye shall know them."

This framework remains directly useful for evaluating modern revival and charismatic movements, including the global growth treated at Pentecostalization of Global Christianity. Edwards gives a third path between cynicism that dismisses all experience and credulity that accepts all of it: test the fruit (Galatians 5:22-23), test the doctrine, and expect real grace to produce humility and holiness over time. See Christian Discernment and Argument from Religious Experience.

Philosopher

Edwards was also a speculative philosopher of the first rank, working largely in private notebooks (the Miscellanies) that were published only long after his death. Among his positions:

Idealism. Independently of Berkeley, Edwards argued that the material world exists only in minds, ultimately in the mind of God. See Idealism.
Continuous creation. He held that created things do not persist by their own power but are upheld and, in effect, created anew by God at every moment, a view with affinities to Occasionalism and directly relevant to the Argument from the Continuance of Being.
Beauty and excellency. He grounded ethics and aesthetics in the beauty of God, defining true virtue as benevolence toward being in general and seeing created beauty as an image of divine excellency. See Argument from Beauty.

Apologetic significance

The classic compatibilist answer to the free-will objection. When critics claim that divine sovereignty makes human responsibility incoherent, or that a predestining God is unjust, Freedom of the Will supplies a rigorous philosophical defense that sovereignty and responsibility fit together. See Compatibilism and God Created Me Knowing I Would Reject Him Objection Defeater.
A model of testing spiritual experience. Religious Affections answers both the skeptic who reduces all religious experience to emotion and the enthusiast who treats all emotion as the Spirit. Its criteria (God-centered object, humility, changed nature, persevering practice) are a durable standard for evaluating revivals and claims of the miraculous.
Faith and reason in one mind. Edwards read Locke and Newton as a young man and engaged the most advanced philosophy of his day without abandoning Reformed orthodoxy. He is a standing counterexample to the claim that serious intellectual work and fervent, revivalist Christianity cannot coexist.
Revival as a historical datum. Edwards' careful eyewitness accounts of the Northampton awakening and the Great Awakening are among the best-documented early modern reports of mass religious conversion, with changes of life that he tracked over years rather than days. See Argument from Transformed Lives.
An honest flaw. His slaveholding is a reminder that great theologians are fallible and that Scripture judges its interpreters, not the reverse; it also shows that the anti-slavery argument his heirs made was drawn from his own theology. See Christian Abolitionist Movement.

Major works

A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), account of the Northampton revival of 1734-1735
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), the Enfield sermon
The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), first set of tests for revival
Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), defense of the Awakening against its critics with warnings against its excesses
A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), mature treatment of true and false religious experience
An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd (1749), the missionary biography that inspired generations of missionaries
Freedom of the Will (1754), defense of compatibilist freedom against Arminian self-determination
The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758)
Two Dissertations: The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue (1765, posthumous)
A History of the Work of Redemption (1774, posthumous), sermons on redemptive history