Massachusetts Congregational minister who produced one of the most thorough and compelling bodies of theological writing in the history of America. Edwards, the son of a Congregational minister, entered the ministry in 1726 after a bachelor's degree at Yale, further independent study, and brief service as a Yale tutor and in the Presbyterian church of New York City. His first charge was Northampton, Massachusetts, where he served until dismissed in 1750 after a controversy with his congregation over standards for church admission. He then labored in frontier Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as minister to congregations of Indians and whites. His death from inoculation for smallpox came on March 22, 1758, only a few weeks after he began his work as president of the College of New Jersey.
Edwards's claim to be regarded as America's greatest evangelical theologian, and perhaps the greatest of any variety, rests on both the depth and breadth of his writing and his importance for both practical and theoretical religion. He was the theologian of the First Great Awakening, and every bit as important in explicating that movement as George Whitefield had been in promoting it. He was also the eighteenth century's most powerful exponent of experimental Calvinism. In between his active labors as a pastor and his more popular preaching and writing, he found time to compose works of rarified theological construction which challenge scholars to this day. The ongoing publication of a definitive edition of Edwards's works by Yale University Press makes clear how large his contributions were, not only in several divisions of theology defined more narrowly, but also in metaphysics, ethics, and psychology.
Theology. Edwards is most often studied for his Augustinian description of human sinfulness and divine all-sufficiency. In such early sermons as "God Glorified in Man's Dependence" (1731), "A Divine and Supernatural Light" (1733), and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), he anticipated in a popular way the themes that would inform his later theological treatises. The root of human sinfulness was antagonism toward God; God was justified in condemning sinners who scorned the work of Christ on their behalf; conversion meant a radical change of the heart; true Christianity involved not just an understanding of God and the facts of Scripture but a new "sense" of divine beauty, holiness, and truth.
Edwards eventually summarized many of these insights in 1754 when he published A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, Which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. In this commanding treatise Edwards argued that the "will" was not an independent faculty but an expression of more basic human motivation. To "will" something was to act in accordance with the strongest motives prevailing within a person. Edwards was here arguing in traditional Augustinian and Calvinistic fashion that human action is always consistent with human character. But he bent his dialectic skill especially to show that modern versions of "free will" served merely to obviate human responsibility and reduce analysis of human choice to a non-sensical infinite regression.
Uppermost in Edwards's mind were the implications for conversion which this view of human nature entailed. It meant that a sinner by nature would never choose to glorify God unless God himself changed that person's character or, as Edwards phrased it, implanted a new "sense of the heart" to love and serve God. Regeneration, God's act, was the basis for repentance and conversion, the human actions.
In a posthumously published volume, Original Sin (1758), Edwards defended the view of human nature which underlay the argument in Freedom of Will. This volume contended that all humanity was present in Adam at the fall and that all people, as a consequence, shared the bent toward sinning which Adam had brought upon himself. Edwards felt that he could show in this way how individuals were responsible for their own sinfulness and yet also were bound to the dictates of a fallen nature until converted by God's sovereign grace. Edwards's willingness to postulate a nearly Platonic connection between Adam and the rest of humanity also provided a glimpse of the recondite philosophical reasoning with which he had been filling his private notebooks for years.
As a result of his Calvinistic convictions as well as his experiences in the Great Awakening, Edwards also propounded important ideas on the church and on eschatology. To Edwards the church was the bride of Christ, which, as such, should be made up only of the professedly regenerate. While in the last analysis God must be the judge of the heart, the church on earth had the responsibility to preserve its character, and especially its administration of the Lord's Supper, as purely as possible. It was this conviction which drove Edwards to repudiate the belief of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, that the Lord's Supper should be thrown open to all nonscandalous people in a community, even those without a profession of faith. And it was this conviction which ultimately cost Edwards his pulpit in Northampton.
Encouraged by the early successes of the Great Awakening, Edwards countenanced the idea that the millennial dawn was about to break in New England. A series of sermons, published eventually in 1744 as A History of the Work of Redemption, expressed his fondest hopes for the beginning of the realized kingdom as a result of the Holy Spirit's work in the awakening. Later, as revival fires cooled, Edwards universalized his hopes for the eschaton and planned to write a full account of God's activity in world history. Death prevented his completion of that project, but he did complete a related work, A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (published 1765), which set out a more general vision of God's glory as the end to which all history moved.
Psychology. Edwards's examination of religious psychology arose directly out of his experiences in the Northampton revivals and, later, in the colonial Great Awakening as a whole. A letter to Boston's Benjamin Colman in 1736, later published as Narrative of Surprising Conversions, was the first of a series of works examining the nature and expression of awakened religious experience. This work analyzed events occurring during a local revival in Northampton, but soon Edwards published Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1743) to take account of the wider movement. In particular, he responded to charges by antirevivalists that the revival was all emotion, froth, and disorder. Edwards conceded that the emotionalism of the awakening could undercut authentic Christianity, but he also defended the revival by pointing to the more intense worship and to the permanently changed lives it left in its wake.
Three years later Edwards published his most mature examination of this subject, A Treatise on the Religious Affections, a book which has, with justice, been likened in its acuity to William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This volume argued that true religion resides in the heart, or the seat of affections, emotions, and inclinations. But it also detailed with painstaking scrutiny the kinds of religious emotions that are largely irrelevant to any determination of true spirituality. The book closed with a description of twelve "marks" which indicate the presence of true religion. The first of these was a religious affection arising "from those influences and operations on the heart, which are spiritual, supernatural and divine." The last was the manifestation of true religion, genuinely gracious affections, in Christian practice. Edwards's careful analysis of genuine faith emphasized, in sum, that it was not the quantity of emotions which indicated the presence of true spirituality, but the origin of such emotions with God and their manifestation in works in accord with the law of God.
Metaphysics. Edwards's metaphysical speculations also deserve consideration as part of his religious convictions, since they were so intensely theological. They have been largely ignored in the subsequent history of American evangelical theology, but they still represent a compelling effort to view reality in strictly theistic terms. Edwards recorded most of his metaphysical work in notebooks which have begun to be published only in recent years. But these more substantial reflections are consonant with modes of thought present in Freedom of Will and other works published during his life.
In broadest terms Edwards's metaphysical reflections demonstrate the truthfulness of James Ward Smith's contention that Edwards alone of eighteenth and nineteenth century American theologians understood the "deeper spirit" as well as the "superficial corpus" of the new science associated with Newton and Locke. Edwards read these two giants with intense interest and considerable pleasure. He also accepted important aspects of their thought, such as Newton's description of the relationship among physical entities (i.e., universal gravitational attraction) and Locke's notions of memory and, with some qualifications, sensation. Yet Edwards was not tied uncritically to these two, and he profited as well from his wide reading in other seventeenth century philosophers, including the Cambridge Platonist Henry More.
Edwards's most important metaphysical commitment was to idealism. Physical reality and physical laws are not self-explanatory, according to Edwards's, but are the result of God's constant and voluntary choices. With this conviction Edwards was still able to accept most of Newtonian science. As he put it: "To find out the reasons of things in natural philosophy is only to find out the proportion of God's acting. And the case is the same...whether we suppose the world [is] only mental in our sense, or no." Yet Edwards repudiated the dualism between mind and matter which Newton assumed and which was the heart of Locke's epistemology. Rather, as Edwards phrased it in his notes on "The Mind": "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."
For Edwards this idealism was an outgrowth of his surpassingly high view of God. All reality, not just all religious occurrences, depended upon the harmony, goodness, consistency, and orderliness of God.
Ethics. Most of the major themes of Edwards's theology came together in the ethical interests which dominated the last period of his life. In particular he was concerned to argue against "the new moral philosophy" of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. This was a tendency, traceable to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the Scottish moralist Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and to many other ethicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who argued that human beings possessed some natural faculty or sense which, when cultivated properly, could point the way to a truly virtuous life. In response to this broad intellectual tendency, which was the ethical counterpart to the generally ameliorative views of human nature prominent in his century, Edwards reacted strongly by contending that true virtue could not be understood apart from God and his revelation. It was Edwards's argument, especially in the posthumously published Nature of True Virtue (1765), that genuine morality arises only from God's regenerating mercy.
In his ethical deliberations Edwards returned constantly to the contribution of grace to ethical behaviour. His dilemma was to show how his well-developed theology of the renewed heart (an Augustinian motif shared by Puritans such as William Ames) differed from the natural sentimentalism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Edwards's goal was to give seventeenth century conceptions of Puritan piety, which tied true virtue to God's work in the heart, a respectable philosophical defense for his own century.
Edwards's approach involved three steps. He first acknowledged a limited value in the work of the new moralists. People by nature, because of God's common grace, did possess the capacity to act ethically in a carefully qualified sense. Natural conscience did have a prudential value in regulating conduct, sentiments of symmetry and beauty did provide insights into the nature of human morality, piety and familial affection did help stabilize society, and a natural "moral sense" did reveal some truths about the ethical world.
Secondly, however, Edwards insisted that the socially useful benefits of natural virtue fell far short of true virtue. For him the unshakable foundation remained the regenerating grace by which God quickened the sinner. In his own words: "Nothing is of the nature of true virtue, in which God is not the first and the last." In sum, Edwards was asserting in ethics what he had previously asserted concerning the inner life in Religious Affections and concerning conversion in Freedom of Will. No truly good thing, speaking stricly, exists which is not always and everywhere dependent upon God.
Thirdly, Edwards also tried to show that the picture of virtue presented by the new moral philosophers was merely a confusing description of prudence, self-seeking, and self-love. In these efforts Edwards was striving to preserve the particularity of grace. By so doing, he hoped to reassert the unique goodness of God as the sole legitimate source of true virtue.
Edwards's thought has been a theological landmark for many subsequent American Christians, but only a very few have seriously tried to maneuver by his coordinates. This lack of successors to continue his theological emphases may be due to the changing conditions of an increasingly democratic America; it may be due to weaknesses in his thought; or it may be due to the incapacity of those who called themselves "Edwardseans." In any event, the theology of Jonathan Edwards remains of great interest both for historians of the eighteenth century and for some modern theologians, especially those who sense a need for a renewed presentation of philosophically sophisticated Calvinistic and Augustinian theology in the modern world.
M. A. NOLL