Edwards, Jonathan

Edwards, Jonathan (1703–58), American evangelical preacher and Calvinist theologian. He was ordained to the ministry of the Congregational church at Northampton, Mass., in 1727, and was drawn into the public arena by his congregation's participation in a series of revivals beginning in 1734. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s he emerged as the champion of evangelical religion; he preached the necessity of a ‘new birth’ and in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) he defended the role of both the will and the intellect in the religious life. In 1750 he was dismissed from his congregation because he insisted on strict standards for admission to Communion. He then served as a missionary to the Indians at Stockbridge, Mass. There he wrote Freedom of the Will (1754), as well as works on human depravity and ethics. Freedom, as popularly understood, he rejected, maintaining that self-determination was ‘unphilosophical, self-contradictory and absurd’ and that the essence of virtue and vice lay ‘not in their cause but in their nature’. Regarded as the foremost American theologian and philosopher of the colonial period, Edwards exercised considerable influence through his writings, through a school of disciples known as the ‘New England Theologians’, and through the expansion of the evangelical movement.