Edwards, Jonathan

Edwards, Jonathan (1703–58), born in Connecticut, entered Yale before he was 13 and graduated in 1720. His interest in scientific observation was manifested at the age of 11 in an account Of Insects, on phenomena related to the flying spider (Andover Review, Jan. 1890), and a group of acute comments on The Soul, The Rainbow, Being, and Colours. While at Yale he read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding with more delight than a “greedy miser” finds in “some newly discovered treasure,” and began to combine reflections on the mind with his observations of natural science. He made a precocious venture into Berkeleyan idealism, evidently without knowing Berkeley, and, in his Notes on the Mind, decided: “That which truly is the substance of all Bodies, is the infinitely exact, and precise, and perfectly stable Idea, in God's mind, together with his stable Will, that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established Methods and Laws.”

After two additional years of theological study at Yale, and a year of tutoring there, he became (1726) the colleague of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard in the Congregational pastorate at Northampton, Mass. He had made a series of formal Resolutions for his spiritual progress, but it is in his Personal Narrative (written c. 1740) that he rehearses his spiritual autobiography. Here one sees his intense absorption in the idea of God's infinite will throbbing through the universe. Edwards married Sarah Pierpont (1727), whom he had described four years earlier in a famous lyrical passage. Upon the death of his grandfather (1729), he became the sole pastor of the Northampton church. With stern discipline and exalted fervor he fought the growing Arminianism and the weakening of Congregational churches through the Half‐Way Covenant, writing a Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) and A Vindication of the Gospel Doctrine of Justifying Faith (1746). His discourse God Glorified in … Man's Dependence upon Him (1731) attacked those who relied for salvation solely on moral effort, and his sermon on Divine and Supernatural Light (1734) argued that saving grace came solely from the mind's supernatural illumination by the loveliness of divine holiness. There ensued a tremendous revival of religious fervor, the Great Awakening, in which the community, lacking its pastor's iron will, gave way to a wave of emotionalism and morbid belief in God's absolute justification in condemnation. Edwards's sermons ranged from those on Charity and Its Fruits (1738) to the notorious Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741). Although he criticized the hysterical excitement that accompanied the Awakening, he defended it as a vitally important crisis in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), and An Humble Attempt To Promote Visible Union of God's People (1747). He explained that the two activities of the mind—understanding and inclination or will—are indispensable for true religion. Man wills what he loves, and, instead of depending upon mere understanding of God and obedience to worldly morality, he shares directly in the divine light.

When Edwards applied this criterion to admission to the Lord's Supper, excluding those who wished to ally themselves to the church without supernatural conversion, his parishioners grew resentful, and this and other matters led to his dismissal (1750). After preaching his dignified Farewell Sermon (published 1751), he became a missionary to the Housatonic River Indians and pastor of a small congregation at Stockbridge. He had meanwhile published his apologia, An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God (1749), and An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd (1749), an example of piety. In his next attack on Arminianism, Edwards reverted to the Notes on the Mind, developing his ethical point of view in A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of … Freedom of Will (1754), his greatest work, which became a primary Calvinistic document. In The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), he argues that depravity is inevitable, since an identity of consciousness and a continuity of divine action make all men as one with Adam. The Nature of True Virtue, in Two Dissertations (1765), upholds virtue as moral beauty, which, in the form of love, seeks the highest good of all being. Since God is the supreme object, truly disinterested love will be directed toward Him. The lower form of natural virtue rests on self‐love, and those not enlightened by saving grace will only perceive and approve justice and benevolence, rather than the essential and primary beauty of virtue. In the second of the Dissertations, Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (written 1755), he returned to the mystic pantheism of his youth, declaring the world to be an emanation of God's infinite fullness, created to express His glory. Since He is the supreme excellence, He loves the world as He is infused into it. In this, Edwards's tendency to negate the personal, Hebraic concept of God and to view Him as an infinite being foreshadows Transcendentalism. After his work in Stockbridge, he became president of the college of New Jersey, an office he held from January 1758 until his death in March.

Jonathan Edwards (1745–1801), his son, edited his works, propagated his doctrines, and continued his career as a pastor in New Haven, where he was dismissed (1795) because of a similar objection to the Half‐Way Convenant.