Jonathan Edwards Biography, Books, and Sermons

He is remembered, unfairly, for a single sermon about a spider dangling over a fire. But the man who preached it spent most of his life on his knees in the woods, watching real spiders with delight, and writing some of the most careful prose ever produced in America about the beauty of God. Jonathan Edwards was a pastor who was fired by his own congregation, a missionary on a violent frontier, and a college president for five weeks. He was also, by common consent, the finest theological mind the American church has produced. The two facts belong together.

A Minister's Son in the Connecticut Valley

Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, the fifth of eleven children and the only son of Timothy Edwards, the town's minister. His mother, Esther, was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the formidable pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts — a man so dominant in the Connecticut Valley that people called him its pope. Jonathan grew up in a house of ten sisters and a great deal of Latin, and the shadow of his grandfather's pulpit fell across his whole life.

He was a precocious boy by any measure. He entered Yale College in 1716, just shy of his thirteenth birthday, and graduated in 1720 as valedictorian, staying on for two more years of graduate study in divinity.

Here a beloved story needs gentle correcting. It is often said that Edwards wrote a brilliant scientific essay on flying spiders at the age of eleven or twelve. The essay is real and it is wonderful — but the child-prodigy dating comes from his great-grandson and biographer Sereno Dwight, and modern scholarship has revised it. Edwards jotted his first observations in a notebook, Of Insects, around 1720–21 as a teenager, and sent the polished “Spider Letter” to Paul Dudley of the Royal Society on 31 October 1723, when he was twenty. The truth is less astonishing and more characteristic: a young man lying in the New England grass, tracking the gossamer of ballooning spiders across an autumn sky, and finding in them not merely mechanics but generosity — evidence, he wrote, of the exuberant goodness of a Creator who provided not only for the necessities but for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.

That instinct never left him. Edwards looked at the world and saw it leaking glory.

A New Sense of the Heart

His piety, however, was not yet his own. As a boy he prayed, by his own account, five times a day in secret, and he and his schoolmates built a booth in a swamp, in a very retired spot, as a place of prayer. Yet he later judged these seasons to be religious excitement rather than grace. And there was a doctrine he could not swallow. From his childhood up, he wrote, his mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty — the idea that God might choose whom he would seemed to Edwards a horrible doctrine.

Then, around 1721, reading a doxology he must have read a hundred times before, something broke open.

As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before.

— Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative

The text was 1 Timothy 1:17: Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever, Amen. What changed was not his information but his taste. The doctrine he had hated became, in his phrase, an exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet doctrine. This is the hinge of everything Edwards would later write: the difference between knowing that God is holy and actually tasting it — what he called the sense of the heart. Holiness, he said, now appeared to him to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature, bringing an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul.

He became a man who walked. He spent most of his time thinking of divine things, year after year, often walking alone in the woods and solitary places for meditation, soliloquy, and prayer, and converse with God; and it was always his manner at such times, he said, to sing forth his contemplations. Prayer stopped being a duty and became a reflex — it seemed natural to him, he wrote, as the breath by which the inward burnings of his heart had vent.

Seventy Resolutions

Beginning in 1722, aged eighteen and serving a small Presbyterian congregation in New York, Edwards started writing resolutions — rules for a life he intended to spend entirely. He added to them over roughly a year; number thirty-five is dated 18 December 1722, the seventieth 17 August 1723. He resolved to read the whole list over once a week for the rest of his life.

They are ferocious. Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can. Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.

Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live. … Resolved, that I will live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.

— Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions, nos. 6 and 17

What saves the list from mere self-improvement is the sentence he wrote above it, before he wrote a single “Resolved.” He knew exactly what he was attempting, and how little he could manage it.

The Young Lady in New Haven

In 1723, on the blank leaf of a Greek grammar, the same young man wrote something quite unlike a resolution. He had met Sarah Pierpont, daughter of the minister of the New Haven church. He was twenty; she was thirteen. He was, plainly, undone.

He wrote that there was a young lady in New Haven who was beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world; that she would sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seemed to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knew for what. She loved to be alone, he wrote, walking in the fields and groves, and seemed to have some one invisible always conversing with her. He noticed her strange sweetness of mind and singular purity of affection — and that you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the world.

It is the loveliest thing he ever wrote, and it is not a love letter but a piece of theology: he had found a person who lived in the reality he had only just tasted. They married on 28 July 1727 and had eleven children. The marriage lasted thirty-one years, and he would call it, at the very end, an uncommon union.

Northampton and the Surprising Work of God

Edwards was ordained at Northampton on 15 February 1727 as his grandfather Stoddard's colleague. When Stoddard died in February 1729, the twenty-five-year-old inherited the most important pulpit in New England outside Boston.

In November 1734 he preached a series on justification by faith alone. What followed astonished him. Through the winter and spring the town was seized. Edwards reckoned that more than three hundred souls were savingly brought home to Christ in Northampton in the space of half a year, out of a town of some eleven hundred — and, he noted with his usual precision, about the same number of males as females. The town, he wrote, seemed to be full of the presence of God; never so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress.

He described it in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), with careful case studies — Abigail Hutchinson, a young woman who died joyfully, and Phebe Bartlet, converted at four. It went through twenty printings by 1738 and made Edwards internationally famous. He had, in effect, invented the modern revival narrative.

Enfield, 1741

The greater Awakening came with George Whitefield's tour in 1740. On 8 July 1741, Edwards preached at Enfield, Connecticut — a town notorious for resisting the revival while its neighbours were swept — on Deuteronomy 32:35, Their foot shall slide in due time. The sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

The caricature has him roaring. The eyewitness record says otherwise about the room, if not the man: Stephen Williams, who was present, recorded that before the sermon was done there was such moaning and crying out through the whole house — What shall I do to be saved? — that the minister was obliged to stop preaching. Edwards read from a manuscript in a level voice. The terror was in the text, not the theatrics; and the sermon's actual climax is not the spider but the open door, the offer of mercy.

He spent the following years thinking about what he had seen, including its counterfeits. Religious Affections (1746) is his mature verdict: true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections — not in raw emotion, and not in cold assent, but in a heart genuinely changed toward God. In 1747 he published An Humble Attempt, calling Christians everywhere into united, extraordinary prayer for revival and for the nations. Remember that book.

Dismissed

Then came the reversal that no admirer can smooth over.

Stoddard had admitted to the Lord's Table anyone of upright life, whether or not they professed conversion; the practice had stood in Northampton for decades. Edwards came to believe it was wrong — that communion belonged to those who could make a credible profession of faith. When he said so publicly in 1749, the town turned.

The quarrel was not only theological. It ran through years of local grievance: disputes over his salary, his handling of the “Bad Book” affair in which he named respectable young people from the pulpit, and the long enmity of the powerful Williams clan. On 22 June 1750 an ecclesiastical council voted for his dismissal by 10 to 9, and the congregation ratified it overwhelmingly — more than two hundred to twenty-three. After twenty-three years, the most celebrated preacher in America was voted out by the people who knew him best.

On 1 July 1750 he preached his Farewell Sermon, from 2 Corinthians 1:14, on the day when pastor and people would meet again before the judgement seat. It is restrained to the point of severity. There is no self-pity in it. He was forty-six, unemployed, with a wife and ten children at home.

The Frontier Years

In August 1751 he was installed at Stockbridge, a mission settlement on the Massachusetts frontier, as pastor to a small English congregation and missionary to the Housatonic Mahican and, later, Mohawk peoples. It was a demotion by every worldly measure: a remote village, a mission school, a shrinking salary, and the French and Indian War closing in.

He was not a passive figure there. He fought the mission's tangled management, and he took the Native people's side against the local grandee Colonel Ephraim Williams — whose clan had helped drive him from Northampton, and whose relatives were now the chief seekers after Indian land. Edwards reported to the Boston commissioners that the Indians had a very ill opinion of Colonel Williams and the deepest prejudice against him, he having often molested them with respect to their lands and other affairs. He wrote letter after letter to Boston on their behalf. He was eventually vindicated — the commissioners declared themselves well satisfied as to his general conduct, and in February 1754 the mission's English patron Isaac Hollis made him overseer of the boarding school. It came too late; most of the Mohawks had already left over the years of mismanagement.

His advocacy and his blind spots sat side by side. He never learned Mahican or Mohawk, preaching through interpreters, and he shared his era's assumption that the gospel arrived bundled with English civilisation. Yet he wrote roughly a hundred and ninety original sermons for the Stockbridge congregation — far more than he troubled to compose for the English one — and he told his hearers plainly that we are no better than you in no respect, only as God has made us to differ and has been pleased to give us more light, and that wealth and worldly power were no evidence whatever of God's favour.

Honesty requires more here. Edwards also owned enslaved people. In June 1731 he travelled to Newport and purchased a girl named Venus, about fourteen years old; over the years the household included others — Joab, Rose, Titus, Joseph, Sue. In a 1741 draft defending a fellow minister he rejected the Atlantic slave trade as cruel while defending slaveholding itself. This is not a footnote to be managed; it is a real and grievous failure in a man who could dissect the human heart better than almost anyone who ever lived, and who did not turn that scalpel here. George Marsden's 2003 biography was the first major life to treat it squarely, and it should be treated squarely. It is worth noting, without using it as absolution, that his son Jonathan Edwards Jr. became an outspoken abolitionist, preaching in 1791 against the injustice and impolicy of the slave trade — asking why slaveholders should be exempt from the golden rule.

And in that hard village, with a quill and no library to speak of, Edwards wrote his greatest work. Freedom of the Will (1754). Original Sin, finished and published in 1758. The two dissertations — Concerning the End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue — written at Stockbridge and published posthumously in 1765. The exile produced the treatises.

A Dark Cloud

In 1757 the College of New Jersey — later Princeton — called him to its presidency after the death of his son-in-law Aaron Burr. Edwards did not want it. In a remarkable letter to the trustees of 19 October 1757 he laid out his objections with almost comic candour, describing himself as having a constitution peculiarly unhappy, attended with a low tide of spirits, often occasioning a kind of childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence and demeanor. He also told them he had a great work he meant to finish: a History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, thrown into the form of a history. He submitted the decision to a council of ministers. They said go. He wept, and went.

He was installed on 16 February 1758. Smallpox was in Princeton, and on 23 February he was inoculated by Dr. William Shippen. The inoculation took badly; pustules formed in his throat and mouth, and he could not swallow. He weakened for a month. Shippen recorded that he showed a calm, cheerful resignation and patient submission throughout, without so much as one discontented expression.

He had been president for five weeks. His daughter Lucy was nursing him. Knowing he was dying, he gave her a message for her mother.

Dear Lucy, it seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you; therefore give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever.

— Jonathan Edwards, last words to his daughter Lucy, March 1758

Those around the bed began to grieve aloud over what the college had lost. Edwards, whom they thought unconscious, spoke once more: Trust in God, and ye need not fear. He died on 22 March 1758, aged fifty-four.

Sarah, herself ill, received the news by letter. On 3 April she wrote to their daughter Esther: A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. She followed him within months.

What Came After

He died with his great history unwritten, dismissed by his own church, buried on a campus he had barely seen. By the metrics he would have been tempted to use at twenty, the life reads as a series of closing doors.

But recall An Humble Attempt, that 1747 plea for Christians to unite in extraordinary prayer for revival and for the nations — a book that seemed, in his lifetime, to accomplish very little.

He was not a plaster saint. He was voted out by his neighbours, he held people in bondage, he could be rigid, and he knew his own heart was worse than anyone guessed — he said he had a vastly greater sense of his own wickedness after his conversion than ever before. What he had was a settled conviction that God is infinitely, actually beautiful, and that the chief business of a human life is to see it and say so. He spent himself on that, with all his might, while he did live.