Jonathan Edwards

Their life

Colonial America’s most formidable mind — a preacher-philosopher who wrote seventy personal Resolutions at nineteen and examined his own soul with scientific rigor. Central figure of the Great Awakening, author of treatises on freedom of the will and the nature of true affections, and, at the end of his life, president of Princeton. He walked in the woods to think and wrote of beauty as seriously as of judgment.

Known for

• Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
• Leading figure of the Great Awakening
• Freedom of the Will
• Religious Affections
• Personal Resolutions written at nineteen
• Stockbridge missionary and Princeton president

The road they walked

Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son among eleven children in a family of Puritan clergy on both sides. He entered Yale College at thirteen, graduated at the top of his class, and spent his young adulthood in a state of relentless self-examination — cataloguing his failures and ambitions into seventy numbered Resolutions, rereading them weekly to check his own drift. In 1727 he married Sarah Pierpont, whose spiritual intensity matched his own, and joined his grandfather Solomon Stoddard as co-pastor of the Northampton, Massachusetts church, inheriting the pulpit outright two years later.

The Northampton congregation experienced a startling revival in 1734–35 — sudden waves of conversion that Edwards documented with the same careful, observational eye he'd once turned on himself, in an account that circulated through the colonies and across the Atlantic. It became a template for what followed: the Great Awakening of the early 1740s, an unruly, emotional, and controversial revival movement that split New England churches into factions. Edwards preached inside it and tried to referee it — most famously in his 1741 Enfield sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' with its image of souls suspended over a fire by a thread — while also writing, in Religious Affections, a rigorous case for telling authentic conversion from mere theatrical emotion. He was, at once, a revivalist and a skeptic of revivalism's excesses, and he never saw those two impulses as contradictory.

His own congregation eventually turned on him. Edwards broke with his grandfather's practice of open communion, insisting members show a credible profession of faith before receiving the sacrament — a position that cost him his pulpit in 1750 after two decades of service. He took what looked like a demotion, a missionary post to the Housatonic people at Stockbridge on the Massachusetts frontier, and used the relative isolation to write his most ambitious philosophical work: Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, and treatises on virtue and God's purposes that argued, with unusual rigor for the period, that beauty and being were bound up with the nature of God himself. It was from this outpost, in 1757, that he was called to the presidency of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton.

How their story ended

Edwards died in 1758, just weeks after arriving in Princeton to take up its presidency. He had received a smallpox inoculation as a precaution, a common but risky practice at the time, and died from complications of the procedure — a quiet, almost accidental end for a man who had spent his life anticipating larger and more dramatic reckonings.