Today in Church History: The Death of Jonathan Edwards

b. October 5, 1703 – d. March 22, 1758 • Congregational

Edwards, Jonathan (1703–1758). Calvinist theologian and philosopher, born in Windsor, Connecticut, on October 5, 1703, to Timothy (1669–1758) and Esther Edwards (1672–1771). His father and grandfather were Puritan ministers. Edwards studied philosophy (including Enlightenment ideas from John Locke [1632–1704] and Isaac Newton [1642–1727]), languages, and logic at Yale. In 1721 he had a conversion experience after struggling with sexual sin. This experience greatly shaped his thought, as seen in the writings he began the next year such as his famous Resolutions, his diary, and his philosophical and scientific works, wherein he celebrated God’s glory as seen in the natural world’s harmony, beauty, and order. Overall, he rejected most aspects of the mechanical philosophy of his time but also appropriated some of them, arguing that God is the ground of all being and holds all of the universe together, down to its atoms, which displays his love. He would spend the rest of his life developing his thinking on love, teaching that God created the universe to extend his love, human love pointed to God’s love, and love was a sign of true Christianity (Marsden 2003, 462, 106, 190).

In 1722 Edwards began his work as a pastor at a Presbyterian church in New York, where he stayed for eight months. Here, he began writing his “Miscellanies,” a series of theological reflections that also serves as a kind of autobiography, which he would work on for over thirty years. In 1723, Edwards returned home to finish his master’s degree, writing his thesis on justification and the Calvinist versus Arminian debate; he would spend the rest of his life opposing Arminianism. Later that year, he worked as a pastor for a church in Bolton, Connecticut, and began his notebooks on Scripture and the book of Revelation. Starting in 1724, he worked as a tutor at Yale for two years, which supported his research on natural theology and mental philosophy, developing his idealistic phenomenalism (that the world exists in the human mind) and his belief in excellency as the telos (end, completion, goal) of order. There he experienced a spiritual and physical health crisis, feeling troubled about his conversion and almost dying.

In 1726 Edwards resigned from his tutor position to work as an assistant pastor to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) in Northampton, Massachusetts, and was ordained and married the following year; he would have eleven children with his wife, Sarah. In 1729 Stoddard died and Edwards became the congregation’s only pastor, thus temporarily setting his studies aside to focus on ministry, meanwhile getting sick again. Around this time, Edwards also began a new notebook on biblical typology.

From 1734 to 1735, the congregation experienced revival—with many young people being converted and almost the entire town in good health—which led Edwards to claim Satan had been restrained for a time. When a series of suicides occurred, Edwards identified it as an expected backlash (Marsden 2003, 150, 160, 168–69). Then, when the Great Awakening began in 1740, Edwards befriended influential preachers like George Whitefield (1714–1770) and defended the idea of revival, explaining that this phenomenon was leading up to the millennium in the timeline of redemptive history, which God governed. In 1741, Edwards preached his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which elicited intense reactions from the congregation, though this did not worry Edwards as he believed that fear could lead to the joy of salvation (Marsden 2003, 221). However, the intense emotions aroused in individuals during the Awakening became controversial, and soon lines developed between the Old Lights (those who opposed revival) and the New Lights (those who supported it), with Edwards defending revival but also blaming the New Lights for the split that occurred (Marsden 2003, 284). He also responded to concerns about intense emotions by showing that such critiques resulted from an artificial division between the will and affections. In 1746 he published his famous treatise on the topic, Religious Affections, wherein he again defended revival and claimed that true religion had holy affections.

Three years later, Edwards published a biography of his friend David Brainerd (1718–1747), who was a missionary. He also began disciplining many of his congregants for sinful behavior. He changed church practices, implementing closed communion (to replace the open communion practice that Stoddard had maintained), which led to controversy within the church. Tensions ran so high that Edwards was dismissed from his pastoral position in 1750.

In 1751, he moved his family to Stockbridge and pastored the congregation there. This position allowed him to take up his studies again. He was very productive, writing various treatises, including his famous 1754 treatise The Freedom of the Will, which argued that God is sovereign over every single thing in the universe. Moreover, he asserted that humanity has the ability to choose, but is bound by sin and thus does not have true free will. In this treatise, he again attacked Arminianism.

At this time, Edwards also had success teaching and preaching to the Housatonic Native Americans, who he believed had an inferior culture but great potential to learn about God and become spiritually superior to degenerate New Englanders (Marsden 2003, 389, 392). Overall, Edwards was a conservative who believed in a social hierarchy; thus, though he opposed the practice in slavery of stealing people from another nation and its unequal treatment of essentially equal people, he did not oppose the institution itself and owned slaves.

In 1758, Edwards left his pastoral position to become the next president of what would become Princeton. He died only weeks later, on March 22, after being inoculated for smallpox. In the Princeton cemetery, he was buried next to the previous president, Aaron Burr (1716–1757), the father of the third vice president of the United States. Overall, Edwards’s thought was popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century among evangelicals but began to dwindle toward the end due to a negative perception of his teachings on total depravity. His thought was later revived in the mid-twentieth century, and he is studied today as an important figure in American history, best remembered for his work in natural theology.

J. S. de Klerk

De Klerk, J.-L. S. (2022). Edwards, Jonathan. In M. A. G. Haykin (Ed.), The Essential Lexham Dictionary of Church History. Lexham Press.