Jonathan Edwards(1703–1758)

Jonathan Edwards was born at East Windsor in the Connecticut Colony on the fifth of October 1703, fifth child and only son of the Reverend Timothy Edwards, Congregational minister of the East Windsor parish, and Esther Stoddard, daughter of the great Northampton Massachusetts divine Solomon Stoddard. The Edwards line descended on the paternal side from the Reverend Richard Edwards of Hertfordshire, a Welsh-extraction clergyman who had emigrated from Hertfordshire to Hartford in the 1640s, and the boy was raised at the East Windsor parsonage on the syllabus of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and the Puritan theological reading set by his father. He entered Yale College at twelve in 1716, took his BA at sixteen in 1720, his MA at nineteen in 1722, and was tutored at Yale as a junior fellow 1724 to 1726.

He was ordained on the fifteenth of February 1727 in his twenty-fourth year as junior pastor at the Northampton, Massachusetts, Congregational church under his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, succeeded to the full pastorate on Stoddard's death in 1729, and held the Northampton pulpit for the next twenty-three years. The Northampton congregation of those years was the largest Puritan parish in western Massachusetts. In December 1734 and through 1735 he preached the series of sermons on justification by faith alone that produced the Connecticut River Valley revival of 1734 to 1735, his account of which (A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, 1737) was the foundational text of the religious revival movement that became, on his and George Whitefield's joint preaching tours of 1740 and 1741, the First Great Awakening.

On the eighth of July 1741, in his thirty-eighth year, he preached at Enfield, Connecticut, the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, the most widely-known sermon in American religious history. The Enfield congregation, by the contemporary account of the witness Stephen Williams, was reduced to such audible distress that Edwards stopped repeatedly mid-sermon to ask for silence; the sermon was printed within the month, ran through twenty-three editions by 1750, and stands at the centre of every modern syllabus of American religious history. He published across the next decade the great body of his mature systematic theology: Religious Affections (1746, the analysis of the marks of genuine religious experience), the History of the Work of Redemption (1751 sermon series, posthumously published 1774), and his masterwork Freedom of the Will (1754, the Calvinist defence of compatibilist determinism against the Arminian and the deist), on every modern list of the foundational works of American philosophical theology.

He was dismissed from the Northampton pulpit in 1750 in a doctrinal dispute over the qualifications for communion, took up a frontier missionary post at the Stockbridge mission to the Mohican and Mahican people in western Massachusetts in 1751, and from the Stockbridge parsonage wrote Freedom of the Will (1754), The Nature of True Virtue (composed 1755, posthumously published 1765), and Original Sin (1758). On the death in 1757 of his son-in-law Aaron Burr Senior (the second president of the College of New Jersey, the future Princeton), the trustees elected Edwards to the presidency. He took up the office at Princeton in February 1758 in his fifty-fifth year, was inoculated against smallpox on the twenty-third of February, contracted the disease from the inoculation, and died at the college on the twenty-second of March 1758 having held the presidency for five weeks. He is buried at Princeton Cemetery. The Edwards name in modern American religious and philosophical history carries the weight of the Northampton revival, the Enfield sermon and Freedom of the Will.