JONATHAN EDWARDS, saint, metaphysician and theologian, stands out as the one figure of real greatness in the intellectual life of colonial America. Born, bred, passing his whole life on the verge of civilization, he has made his voice heard wherever men have busied themselves with those two greatest topics which can engage human thought – God and the soul.
He was distinctly a great man. He did not merely express the thought of his time, or meet it simply in the spirit of his traditions. He stemmed it and moulded it. New England thought was already making toward that colourless theology which marked it later. That he checked. It was decidedly Arminian. He made it Calvinistic. Edwards had a remarkable philosophical bent; but he had an even more remarkable sense and taste for divine things. And, therefore, “we remember him, not as the greatest of American philosophers, but as the greatest of American Calvinists.”
It was a very decadent New England into which Edwards was born, on 5th October 1703. The religious fervour which the Puritan immigrants had brought with them into the New World had not been able to propagate itself unimpaired to the third and fourth generation. Already in 1678, Increase Mather had bewailed that “the body of the rising generation is a poor, perishing, unconverted, and (except the Lord pour down His Spirit) an undone generation.”
The home into which Edwards was born, however, not only protected him from much of the evil which was pervading the community, but powerfully stimulated his religious and intellectual life. He began the study of Latin at the age of six, and by thirteen had acquired a respectable knowledge of “the three learned languages” which at the time formed part of the curricula of the colleges: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He then entered the “Collegiate School of Connecticut” (afterwards Yale College).
He graduated at the head of his class in 1720, when he was just short of seventeen years of age, but remained at college two years longer for the study of Divinity. In the summer of 1722 he was “approbated” to preach, and he supplied the pulpit of a little knot of Presbyterians in New York City. Returning home, he was appointed tutor at Yale in June 1724, and filled this post with distinguished ability for the next two years. His resignation of his tutorship was occasioned by an invitation to become the colleague and successor of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the pastorate of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts, where, accordingly, he was ordained and installed on 15th February 1727.
By his installation at Northampton, Edward’s period of preparation was brought to a close. His preparation had been remarkable. Born with a drop of ink in his veins, Edwards had almost from infancy held a pen in his hand. From his earliest youth he had been accustomed to trace out on paper to its last consequence every fertile thought which came to him. A number of the early products of his observation and reflection have been preserved, revealing a precocity which is almost beyond belief.
Throughout all these formative years he remained first of all a man of religion. He had been the subject of deep religious impressions from his earliest boyhood, and he gave himself, during this period of preparation, to the most assiduous and intense cultivation of his religious nature. “I made seeking my salvation,” he himself tells us, “the main business of my life.” But about the time of his graduation (1720) a change came over him, which relieved the strain of his inward distress. From his childhood, his mind had revolted against the sovereignty of God: “It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.” Now all this passed unobservedly away; and gradually, by a process he could not trace, this very doctrine came to be not merely a matter of course to him but a matter of rejoicing: “The doctrine has very often appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet; absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God.” One day he was reading 1 Timothy 1: 17, “Now unto the King, eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory, for ever and ever, Amen,” and, as he read, “a sense of the glory of the Divine Being” took possession of him, “a new sense, quite different from anything” he “ever experienced before”. He longed to be “rapt up to Him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in Him for ever.” From that moment his understanding of divine things increased, and his enjoyment of God grew. There were, no doubt, intervals of depression. But, on the whole, his progress was steadily upwards and his consecration more and more complete. It was this devout young man, with the joy of the Lord in his heart, who turned his back in the early months of 1727 on his brilliant academic life and laid aside forever his philosophical speculations, to take up the work of a pastor at Northampton.
Edwards was ordained co-pastor with his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, on 15th February 1727, and on the latter’s death, two years later, succeeded to the sole charge of the parish. Northampton was relatively a very important place. It was the county town, and nearly half of the area of the province lay within the county. It was, therefore, a sort of little local capital, and its people prided themselves on their culture, energy, and independence of mind. There was but the one church in the town, and it was probably the largest and most influential in the province, outside of Boston. At one time the membership numbered six hundred and twenty, and included nearly the entire adult population of the town. Stoddard had introduced into the Northampton church the practice of opening the Lord’s Supper to those who made no profession of conversion. In this practice Edwards at first acquiesced; but, becoming convinced that it was wrong, sought after a while to correct it, with disastrous consequences to himself.
To the pastoral care of this important congregation, Edwards gave himself with single-hearted devotion. Assiduous house-to-house visitation did not, it is true, form part of his plan of work; but this did not argue carelessness or neglect; it was in accordance with his deliberate judgment of his special gifts and fitnesses. And, if he did not go to his people in their homes, save at the call of illness or special need, he encouraged them to come freely to him, and grudged neither time nor labour in meeting their individual requirements. He remained, of course, also a student, spending ordinarily from thirteen to fourteen hours daily in his study. This work did not separate itself from, but was kept strictly subsidiary to, his pastoral service.
He was recognized as a remarkable preacher, as arresting and awakening as he was instructive. Filled with the profoundest sense of the heinousness of sin, as an offence against the majesty of God and an outrage against His love, he set himself to arouse his hearers to some realization of the horror of their condition as objects of the divine displeasure, and of the incredible goodness of God in intervening for their salvation. Side by side with the most moving portrayal of God’s love in Christ, and of the blessedness of communion with Him, he therefore set, with the most startling effect, equally vivid pictures of the dangers of unforgiven sin and the terrors of the lost estate. The effect of such preaching, delivered with the force of the sincerest conviction, was overwhelming. A great awakening began in the church at the end of 1735, in which more than three hundred converts were gathered in, and which extended throughout the churches of the Connecticut valley.
For twenty-three years Edwards pursued his fruitful ministry at Northampton; under his guidance the church became a city set on a hill. But in the reaction from the revival of 1741-1742 conditions arose which caused him great searchings of heart, and led ultimately to his separation from his congregation. In this revival, practically the whole adult population of the town was brought into the church; they were admitted under the excitement of the time and under the ruling introduced as long before as 1704 by Stoddard, which looked upon all the ordinances of the church, including the Lord’s Supper, as “converting ordinances”, not presupposing, but adapted to bring about, a change of heart.
As time passed, it became evident enough that a considerable body of the existing membership of the church had not experienced that change of heart by which alone they could be constituted Christians, and indeed they made no claim to have done so. On giving serious study to the question for himself, Edwards became convinced that participation in the Lord’s Supper could properly be allowed only to those professing real “conversion”. It was his duty as pastor and guide of his people to guard the Lord’s Table from profanation, and he was not a man to leave unperformed a duty clearly perceived. Two obvious measures presented themselves to him – unworthy members of the church must be excinded by discipline, and greater care must be exercised in receiving new applicants for membership. It is not necessary to go into the details of the controversy regarding a case of discipline which emerged in 1744, or the subsequent difficulties regarding the conditions of admission to the Lord’s Supper. The result was that, after a sharp contest running through two years, Edwards was dismissed from his pastorate on 22nd June 1750.
By his dismissal from his church at Northampton in his forty-seventh year, his strenuous pastoral labour was brought to an abrupt close. After a few months he removed to the little frontier hamlet of Stockbridge, as missionary of the “Society in London for Propagating the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent” to the Housatonic Indians gathered there, and as pastor of the little church of white settlers.
It was at Stockbridge that he wrote the treatises on which his fame as a theologian chiefly rests: the great works on the Will, and Original Sin, the striking essays on The End for Which God Created the World, and The Nature of True Virtue, and the unfinished History of Redemption. No doubt he utilized material previously collected. He lived practically with his pen in his hand, and accumulated an immense amount of written matter. His seven years at Stockbridge were the fruitful years of Edward’s theological work.
They were interrupted in the autumn of 1757 by an invitation to him to become the President of the College of New Jersey, at Princeton. It was with great reluctance that he accepted this call; it seemed to him to threaten the prevention of what he had thought to make his life-work – the preparation, to wit, of a series of volumes on all the several parts of the Arminian controversy. But the college at Princeton, which had been founded and thus far carried on by men whose sympathies were with the warm-hearted, revivalistic piety to which his own life had been dedicated, had claims upon him which he could not disown. On the advice of a council of his friends, therefore, he accepted the call, and removed to Princeton to take up his new duties, in January 1758.
There he was inoculated for smallpox on 13th February, and died of this disease on 22nd March in the fifty-fifth year of his age. [His doctor wrote, “It pleased God to let him sleep in that dear Lord Jesus, whose kingdom and interest he has been faithfully and painfully serving all his life.”]
Abridged from Edwards and the New England Theology by Benjamin B. Warfield, in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 1912.