Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was a Puritan pastor, philosopher, theologian, and (briefly) college president in eighteenth-century colonial America. Many historians and Christian thinkers have judged him the most brilliant of all American theologians. His influence is still strong. Some of his longer works, including Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will, and The Nature of True Virtue, remain classics in Christian literature. His mind was always at work on the task of explaining the God of the Bible and how his truth related to a changing world. He was a key figure in the astonishing revivals of his day.
In Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University; 2003), biographer George Marsden says one of his main goals was to “understand him as a real person in his own time.” It was a tall task, since Edwards was such an influential, provocative figure, eliciting both passionate admirers and detractors then and now. Marsden certainly admires Edwards but is clear-eyed about his flaws and limitations (most of which Edwards would admit to). The book also enlightens us about colonial America, including the way seeds of revolution were being sown in a society that still considered itself to be thoroughly British.
The final chapter begins: “Edwards spent his whole life preparing to die.” He believed that, for the Christian, death just drew one into Christ’s glory. Life was an opportunity to learn gratitude, worship, and love for the Savior. He attempted to use his time well in training to notice Christ’s love everywhere and to loosen his heart’s attachments to this world. Even his detractors agreed that few Christians have been as focused on the goal of knowing and obeying God.
Edwards characteristically would work out the ramifications from a Scriptural theme or text, then apply them unwaveringly, no matter the cost. He was extraordinarily disciplined in thought and action. He met life and death head on. It seems that the more difficult it was to ponder a truth’s practicalities, the more he warmed to the task. In his writing and sermons, he turned often to the theme of man’s mortality. He often reminded his congregants that the person sitting next to them might be in the grave by next Sunday. But if one had been transformed by God, one could walk confidently with hope and joy at the prospect of seeing Christ face to face. Edwards was always trying to cultivate a sense of grateful awe and dependence for his Savior. It’s little exaggeration to say he was constantly trying to loosen his attachments to worldly pleasures and to meditate on the glories to come. An example is his famous sermon, “Heaven is a world of love.” In heaven, he reasoned, one’s happiness will be intertwined with everyone else’s. The happier I can help you become, the happier I am. Why not start living that way in this life?
No one can reasonably say that Edwards compromised on his convictions so life would be easier. He prayerfully went against the grain on some sensitive issues of the day, including whom should be allowed to be a church member and take the sacraments, the limits of church authority and discipline, and others. One may question his stances or methods while admiring his consistency and lack of regard for his personal consequences. In just a few years, he went from being a beloved pastor in Northampton, Connecticut to being replaced and reviled by his congregation. He did so without bitterness toward his opponents. He had led the congregation through a marvelous awakening involving, at points, most of the townspeople. Dramatic, fruit-producing spiritual changes were common. Edwards had been their pastor in the full sense: in their homes during crises and heartache, marrying them, conducting funerals, sharing joys and sorrows. Now they mostly rejected him. Such rejection understandably hurt him deeply. Yet at no point did he cease to care for them or quit doing what he could for their flourishing (he and his family continued to live in Northampton and attend its church long after his firing). He forgave them as Christ forgave his enemies.
Two years after being voted out of his pastorate in Northampton, Edwards followed a call to minister to Indians in the experimental community of Stockbridge in western Massachusetts. It was dangerous. Neighboring Indian tribes had been prone to violence against other tribes and colonial settlers alike. Edwards at the time had a large and young family. And it was difficult and complicated in other ways, not least because of political turf wars and unjust British policies toward the Indians. He had successes during his six years at Stockbridge, including the education and Christian conversion of several young Indian men. But that period took its toll on Edwards and his family. Still, he obediently stayed true to what he believed was a calling, until the experiment ended.
Many Christians make a discipline of appreciating and experiencing the natural world and God’s general revelation. Few have been as passionate and filled with awe when contemplating nature as Edwards. He constantly saw the glories of nature with childlike wonder at what God had done, always with the goal of learning something about the Creator. As a young man he became fascinated by the study of spiders. He particularly studied “flying” spiders, observing how they glided on the wind. He thought the spiders obviously enjoyed the experience, which suggested to him that “God was not against joy in recreation…”
The most widely read and admired of his works, even to the present day, is Treatise on Religious Affections. His was the Augustinian “voluntarist” stream of thought that stressed that the intellect, without true heart affectations, was insufficient for true faith. In contrast, the intellectualist believed that affections were useful only when constrained by properly informed reason. The difference in the approaches may seem small, but the practical consequences could be large. For example, for Edwards, to be effective preaching must first touch the affections. This is not to say that his sermons were lacking reasoned arguments. Far from it. Even strong bodily responses, such as crying out, were only legitimate when “excited by preaching and the important truths of God’s Word, urged and enforced by proper arguments and motives.” In Religious Affections, he argued that regeneration changed the whole person by changing the primary love of a person, the love at the heart of the person’s being. And yet, crucial as deep experience of God was to the believer, Edwards warned that sin could fool us. Sin could distort perceptions and create counterfeit perceptions. So one couldn’t rely on apparently profound experience alone.
He had his flaws, most of which he was largely aware. He often seemed aloof. He was often uncomfortable in social situations. He knew he was vulnerable to the sin of pride. He made great effort to counter some of his flaws by practicing disciplines of charity, gentleness, and measuring his words. Still, he lost the close, social relationship with the townspeople over his time in Northampton. That fact would eventually pave the way for his dismissal as their pastor.
Edwards thought deeply on the question, “What is a genuine Christian?” Unlike some Christian leaders in New England, he did not think one could develop a reliable, objective test to answer the question in most cases. Yet he knew that not every church attender necessarily had sincere belief and a genuine Christian experience. A contributor to his difficulties with his congregation was his persistence on putting more severe requirements on those applying for church membership and on permission to partake in communion. In Edwards’ time and place, almost everyone attended church. One was not considered a citizen in good standing if one neglected to attend church.
Edwards had long believed that true Christianity must involve the affections. At the heart of his theology and belief on Christian practice, he thought that the will must be radically transformed from pervasive natural self-love to humble love of God. He believed that genuine, or regenerated, Christians, as he put it, saw God as not just useful, but as beautiful. A regenerated person would respond to this experience of God’s beauty and goodness with evidence of heart change.
For Edwards, the experience of Christ in daily life was of paramount importance for the Christian. Everything pointed to the real presence of Christ. Everything in the worship service should be designed to bring attention to and experience that presence. The Lord’s Supper was a primary way that happened in church. Still, for Edwards, God’s words in primary revelation in Scripture were the key to all the other pointers and symbols of God’s covenant love toward his people. All the symbols pointed to the promise of Christ sealing the marriage covenant with the church with his blood. All of life should be lived in awareness of, and grateful awe for, God’s grace in bringing his people into covenant relationship with him forever.
Edwards’ theology was in stark contrast to the fashionable Deist thinking that would be well represented by the leading U.S. Founding Fathers a few decades later. His was no aloof God, a clock maker watching from afar after flipping a switch on a mechanism. Jonathan Edwards saw God in the everyday. He meditated furiously about nature and what it meant about God’s ongoing provision and his character. (He wrote a long essay on his conclusions about God after observing spiders at length.) He paid vigilant attention to international events and speculated about what they revealed about God’s workings. More locally, Edwards was a keen observer of social and religious trends. Often, he could read the tea leaves much sooner than his contemporaries, warning about what he deemed dangerous, celebrating what he saw as evidence of awakenings.
Perhaps his most perceptive, influential, and enduring work was Freedom of the Will. Edwards was a theologian, of course, but he was also a serious philosopher. The philosophical and intellectual currents of his day had turned markedly against his Calvinism. He had long wanted to write a comprehensive treatise defending one of Calvinism’s key tenets: a robust view of God’s sovereignty. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Calvinist view that humans were morally incapable without God’s grace and intervention. To many thinkers of the day, Calvinist doctrine contradicted common sense ideas about moral responsibility and agency. After many years of sporadically collecting thoughts in notebooks on the subject, Edwards published Freedom of the Will in 1754. He saw the debate with the modern view as of primary spiritual importance. He wrote in a 1757 letter: “Notions of this sort are one of the main hindrances of the success of the preaching of the Word, and other means of grace, in the conversion of sinners.”
He took seriously Paul’s admonition to be heavenly minded. He meditated deeply and often on what the Bible said about heaven. He noticed that the book of Revelation grasps at extreme metaphors to try to communicate heaven’s reality. Heaven is “like clear gold,” … In his sermon “Heaven is a World of Love,” he uses his own metaphors to describe the perfect society, where everyone was fully happy because their own happiness was inextricably linked to everyone else’s. There, “no strings are out of tune.” All are bound up in the perfect love of God. In this perfect place, all would partake in a fountain of love emanating from the abundant love of the Father, Son, and Spirit for each other. Perhaps in the next life we’ll have a hundred senses, or a thousand, all employed to experience God fully and enjoy Him forever.
By any standard, Jonathan Edwards was unique. Few have so tenaciously used the gifts God has given them to advance his kingdom. Few have been so intellectually gifted. Even we of modest gifts, though, can learn from his habits of seeing God’s glory daily, in the natural world and the people he created in his image. Few have so transparently and scrupulously assessed their own hearts in light of Scripture. Edwards can also prompt Christians to try to imagine heaven’s glories. Perhaps above all, we can learn from Edwards the importance, since God is God, of following his lead no matter the cost.