A Life Spent for the Glory of God

Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. PSALM 73:25

A house full of daughters. Jonathan Edwards was born on the fifth of October, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, a frontier parish beside the Connecticut River. He was the fifth of eleven children and the only son; his ten sisters were all unusually tall, and their father was said to joke that he had sixty feet of daughters. His father, Timothy Edwards, was the parish minister, a Harvard man who supplemented a modest salary by farming and by tutoring boys for college. His mother, Esther, was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the formidable minister of Northampton, thirty-five miles upriver — a man so dominant in the Connecticut Valley that he was known as the Pope of the region. Between father and grandfather, the boy was surrounded by ministry from birth. He was extraordinarily quick. As a child he wrote observations on the flying spiders of the New England woods, with a precision that would not embarrass a naturalist. He entered the Collegiate School — soon to be Yale — in 1716, not yet thirteen years old, and graduated at the head of his class in 1720. He stayed two further years in New Haven studying divinity.

A new sense of things. The intellect came early. The religion took longer, and he was honest about why. By his own later account in the Personal Narrative, he had been religious from boyhood — he built a booth in a swamp to pray in, he had seasons of great fervour — and none of it had touched the thing that needed touching. What he could not accept was the sovereignty of God. The doctrine that God chooses whom He will save appeared to him horrible. He fought it for years. Then, sometime in 1721, reading a verse he had read a hundred times before — Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever (1 Timothy 1:17) — something opened. He described a sense of the glory of the divine being diffusing itself through his soul, a kind of sweetness altogether new, and quite unlike anything he had experienced in religion before. What is significant is what changed. The doctrine he had hated did not become easier to accept; it became beautiful. He found himself delighting in the very thing that had offended him. This experience became the seed of nearly all his later theology: the conviction that conversion is not the mind being persuaded but the heart being given a new taste, a new sense, so that what was repellent becomes lovely. Around this time he began his Diary and his seventy Resolutions — a young man’s programme for a life wholly ordered towards God, reviewed weekly, and shot through with an urgency about time that never left him.

Northampton. After a brief pastorate in New York and two years as a tutor at Yale, he was called in 1726 to assist his grandfather at Northampton. In July 1727 he married Sarah Pierpont, whom he had first noticed at thirteen and described in a famous scrap of writing as a young woman who walked about singing, beloved of that Great Being who made the world. The marriage was, by every account, unusually happy. They had eleven children. Solomon Stoddard died in 1729 and Edwards inherited the largest and most influential pulpit outside Boston. He kept a punishing schedule — thirteen hours a day in the study by some accounts — and preached to a congregation that had grown accustomed to revivals and to being told they were the finest church in the valley. In 1731 he was invited to preach in Boston, and chose to tell the assembled ministers that God is most glorified in the total dependence of man upon Him. It made his name. Then, in the winter of 1734 and into 1735, something happened in Northampton that neither he nor anyone else had arranged. Following a series of sermons on justification by faith alone, the town was seized. Conversions ran into the hundreds; the character of the place visibly altered. Edwards wrote it up carefully and without exaggeration, and A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God was published in London in 1737. It made him famous across the Atlantic, and it supplied the template by which a generation would recognise revival.

The Great Awakening. The larger wave came at the end of the decade. George Whitefield preached at Northampton in October 1740 — Edwards is said to have wept through the sermon — and the colonies caught fire. On the eighth of July 1741, at Enfield, Edwards preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Accounts describe the congregation crying out before he had finished. He read it, as he read most of his sermons, in a level voice from a manuscript held close to his eyes. But the awakening also produced disorder — shrieking, visions, itinerants denouncing settled ministers, and confident claims to direct revelation. The churches divided between those who declared the whole movement a work of God and those who declared it a delirium. Edwards took the harder path, and it cost him friends on both sides. In The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741) and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742) he argued that a genuine work of God may be accompanied by human excess without ceasing to be genuine, and that the way to judge is not by the noise but by the fruit. The mature statement came in 1746. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections is his masterpiece, and it is a hard book, because it takes away every comfortable test a person might apply to himself and replaces them with ones that cannot be faked.

Dismissal. His grandfather had admitted to the Lord’s Table anyone of upright life, whether or not they professed conversion. Edwards came to believe this was wrong, and said so. The controversy consumed two years and destroyed his ministry. On the twenty-second of June, 1750, the congregation voted to dismiss him, by something like two hundred and thirty votes to twenty-three. He was forty-six, with a large family and no income. His farewell sermon is remarkably free of bitterness. He told them he would meet them again at the judgment seat, and left it there.

Stockbridge, and the end. In 1751 he took the only position available: a frontier settlement at Stockbridge, with a handful of English families and a mission to the Mahican and Mohawk people. He learned to preach through an interpreter, in short plain sermons, and defended the mission against the settlers who were defrauding it. It should have been an exile. It became the most productive period of his life. In seven years at the edge of the wilderness, in a house crowded with children and interrupted by war, he wrote Freedom of the Will (1754), The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, The Nature of True Virtue and The End for Which God Created the World. In 1757 the College of New Jersey — later Princeton — invited him to be its president, following the death of his son-in-law. He protested that he was unfit, awkward in company, and better suited to a study. He went anyway. He arrived in February 1758. Smallpox was in the town, and he was inoculated, which was then a genuine risk. The inoculation went wrong. He died on the twenty-second of March, 1758, aged fifty-four, having been president for about five weeks. He was conscious near the end, and left a message for his absent wife about the uncommon union between them and his hope that it would continue for ever. To those around the bed he said that they should trust in God, and then they need not fear. Sarah died six months later. On hearing of his death she wrote that God had made her adore His goodness — that He had given them her husband for so long, and that she and her children were left to God.