Jonathan Edwards: The Doctrine He Hated

One day, probably in 1721, a seventeen-year-old student in New England was reading his Bible. He had read it all his life. He was the son of a minister and the grandson of a famous one. He could read the Bible in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He was, by any measure, one of the cleverest young men in the American colonies. And he had come to these particular words in Paul’s first letter to Timothy many, many times before.

They were a single sentence of praise, which in the King James Version he used read: “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17).

This time, something happened. Years later, he tried to describe it as carefully as he could. “As I read the words,” he wrote, “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.” He said that no words of Scripture had ever seemed to him the way those words did then. He thought to himself how excellent a Being God was, and how happy he would be if he might enjoy that God, and be with him for ever. He kept repeating the words, and sort of singing them over to himself, and he went to pray, in a way he had never prayed before.

He did not know, at first, what had happened to him. He did not think, “This is my conversion.” He thought it was a lovely experience, and wondered at it. Only later did he see that it was the first taste of something he would spend his whole life trying to describe: the difference between knowing about God and seeing that God is beautiful.

The student’s name was Jonathan Edwards. And the reason that moment mattered so much is that, until then, there was one thing about God he had found almost impossible to accept.

A House Full of Daughters

Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 in East Windsor, a farming parish on the Connecticut River in New England. New England was then a set of British colonies on the east coast of North America, first settled about eighty years earlier by English Puritans who wanted to build communities ordered by the Bible. His father, Timothy Edwards, was the minister of East Windsor. His mother, Esther, was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the powerful minister of Northampton, Massachusetts, a man so influential in the Connecticut Valley that people half-jokingly called him its pope.

Jonathan was the fifth of eleven children and the only boy. He grew up with ten sisters. His father, who prepared boys for college to earn extra money, taught him Latin early, and he learned fast.

He was also, from very young, a boy who looked hard at things. As a teenager he wrote careful notes about the “flying” spiders of the New England woods, which float through the air on long silk threads, working out how they did it. A story often told says he wrote this at eleven or twelve. Modern scholars think his notes on spiders and insects more likely come from his later teens, and the polished letter he wrote about them from when he was about twenty. Either way, it shows the kind of mind he had. He did not just accept that spiders flew. He wanted to know how, and he watched them until he found out. And what struck him most, in the end, was not the mechanics but the generosity of a Creator who gave even spiders pleasure.

Religious, but Not Changed

Jonathan grew up religious. That is not the same as saying he grew up a Christian, and later he was careful to say the difference.

When he was a boy, “some years before I went to college,” as he put it, there was a time of religious awakening in his father’s church. Many people became serious about God, and so did young Jonathan. He prayed five times a day in secret. He talked about religion with other boys. He and some of his schoolmates built a booth, a little shelter, in a swamp in a hidden place, and went there to pray. He felt moved and delighted. He was, for a while, a very religious child.

And then it wore off. The feelings faded. He stopped praying in secret. He went back to his old ways, which he later described with a blunt old Bible phrase, saying that he returned “like a dog to his vomit” (the image comes from Proverbs 26:11). Looking back, he believed that those childhood feelings, however sincere, had not been the real thing. He had enjoyed religion. He had not yet known God.

This is worth stopping on, because it is the experience of a great many people who grow up in Christian homes. You can have strong religious feelings at a camp, or at a moving service, and then find them gone a few weeks later. Edwards did not conclude that his childhood feelings had been fake, exactly. He concluded that feelings are not enough. Something deeper has to change.

Yale at Twelve

In September 1716, a month before his thirteenth birthday, Jonathan went to college. It was the young Collegiate School of Connecticut, which in 1718 was named Yale College after a wealthy donor. At the time it was small, poor and divided: for part of Jonathan’s time there, quarrels about where the college should be located meant that some students, including him, studied at Wethersfield, near his home, instead of at New Haven. He moved to New Haven in 1719.

Imagine being twelve and living among young men of sixteen and seventeen, studying logic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and natural philosophy, which is what people then called science. Jonathan was not just keeping up. He was racing ahead.

His first biographer, Samuel Hopkins, who knew him well later in life, said that when Edwards was about fourteen he read John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a new and difficult book by an English philosopher about how the human mind knows things, and enjoyed it more than a greedy miser enjoys gathering up handfuls of silver and gold. Some modern scholars think he may have read it a little later than that. But whatever his exact age, he plainly loved hard questions. In his college years and just after, he began notebooks with titles like “Of Being” and “The Mind,” where a teenager worked through questions that philosophers still argue about: What does it mean for something to exist? What is space? How do we know that anything is real?

He graduated in 1720, top of his class, at sixteen, and gave the valedictory speech, in Latin. Then he stayed on at New Haven for two more years to study theology.

The Question He Could Not Swallow

So here was a brilliant teenager who loved questions. And there was one question that kept snagging.

Edwards had been brought up in the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of the Puritans. One of its central teachings is the sovereignty of God: that God rules over everything, including salvation, and that it is God, not human beings, who decides whom he will save. Many Christians believe it in some form, and many find it hard. Edwards found it very hard indeed.

He described his objection with startling honesty. “From my childhood up,” he wrote, “my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty,” in choosing whom he would to eternal life and leaving others to perish. “It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.”

It is important to see what kind of question this was. It was not lazy doubt, or doubt as an excuse to do as he liked. It was the honest protest of a mind that wanted God to be fair, and could not see how this was fair. It is the same protest Paul imagines someone making in Romans 9, where he anticipates the question: if God chooses, why does he still find fault with us? Edwards was not the first young believer to struggle with that chapter, and he will not be the last.

What is striking is how he told the story of what happened next. He did not say he found a brilliant argument that knocked down his objections. He said that there came a time when he seemed to be convinced and fully satisfied about it, but that he could never give an account of how, or by what means, he was convinced. He was a person who could argue about anything, and he admitted that in this case it was not argument that settled him. His reason was engaged, and stayed engaged. But something else changed too.

The Pleurisy and the Struggle

Before that change came, there was a hard stretch.

Towards the latter part of his time at college, Edwards fell seriously ill with pleurisy, a painful inflammation of the lining of the lungs, which in those days could easily kill. He wrote that God “brought me nigh to the grave, and shook me over the pit of hell.” He was frightened into seriousness. And then, as soon as he got better, he slipped back into his old ways again.

But he could not settle. He described “great and violent inward struggles,” and making vows and resolutions to God, and breaking off from things he knew were wrong. He became very religious again, seeking salvation with great effort. Yet he said afterwards that he sought it “in a miserable manner.” He was trying harder, but he was still doing it all himself, out of fear. He was running hard in a circle.

It is the kind of honesty that makes Edwards worth reading. He did not pretend that his teenage years were a straight line from doubt to faith. They were a tangle of illness and fear, effort and relapse, sharp questions and stubborn objections. If your own faith has looked like that, you are in good company.

A New Sense

And then came the day with 1 Timothy 1:17.

What changed? Not his information. He knew exactly what the verse said, and had known for years. He could have explained its grammar in Greek. What changed was what he would later call a “sense of the heart.” For the first time, God did not just seem true or powerful or frightening. He seemed glorious, lovely, someone to be enjoyed.

Soon afterwards, Edwards talked with his father about what had been happening to him, and was much affected by the conversation. Then he went out walking alone in his father’s pasture, looking up at the sky and the clouds. As he walked, he said, there came into his mind such a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God that he did not know how to express it. It seemed to him that God’s majesty and his gentleness belonged together: an awesome sweetness, a high and great and holy gentleness.

After that, he said, everything looked different. He saw something of God’s glory in the sun and moon and stars, in the clouds and the blue sky, in the grass and flowers and trees. He used to sit and look at the moon for a long time. He had always been terrified of thunderstorms. Now, he said, a thunderstorm made him glad, because it made him think of the majestic voice of God. He would walk out in the woods and sing his thoughts.

And the doctrine he had hated? This is the most surprising part. It did not simply become bearable. Looking back, he wrote that the sovereignty of God had very often appeared to him “exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet.” A God who is truly God, who does not need us and owes us nothing, and who nevertheless gives himself freely to sinners, had become the God he wanted.

What did Edwards actually come to believe about Jesus? He soon found himself reading the Song of Solomon and applying its words to Christ, especially “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys” (Song of Solomon 2:1, in the King James wording he read). He longed, he said, to be alone with Christ and to be “swallowed up” in him. He had come to see Jesus not as a rule-giver he had to satisfy, but as the beautiful Saviour, full of grace, in whom God’s glory shines. Years later he would preach that sinners are justified, made right with God, by faith in Christ alone, not by anything good in themselves. The young man who had been running in circles trying to save himself had found that salvation was a gift, and that the Giver was lovely.

Seventy Resolutions

In August 1722, aged eighteen, Edwards went to New York City, then a small port town, to preach for about eight months to a little Presbyterian congregation. He lodged with a family there and often walked out alone along the banks of the Hudson River to pray and think. And that winter, at nineteen, he began to write what became the most famous thing he did as a young man: his Resolutions.

There were seventy in the end, written between late 1722 and August 1723. He meant to read them over once a week, and for years he did. Some are about time and death: “Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can,” and “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.” One is a question he resolved to ask himself before doing anything: whether he would be afraid to do it if it were the last hour of his life. One shows exactly the kind of mind he had: he resolved that whenever he thought of a hard question in theology, he would immediately do what he could towards solving it, if nothing prevented him. For Edwards, faith and thinking were not enemies. A hard question about God was not something to run away from. It was something to work on, prayerfully, until it gave up its light.

Read on their own, the Resolutions can sound like a crushing self-improvement plan. But Edwards wrote a short sentence at the top before he wrote a single “Resolved,” and it changes everything. In it he says that he knows he is unable to do anything without God’s help, and he asks God, by his grace, to enable him to keep these resolutions, as far as they agree with God’s will, for Christ’s sake. They were not a ladder to climb up to God. They were the plans of a young man who had already been found by God, and who knew he could not keep a single one of them on his own.

He also kept a diary in those years, and it is full of failures: days of dullness, times of feeling far from God, disappointment with himself. The Resolutions did not make him perfect. They gave him something to come back to.

What Came After

In 1723 Edwards met Sarah Pierpont of New Haven, and wrote a famous short piece about her as a young woman who seemed to be always full of joy, and who walked in the fields as though someone invisible were always with her. They married in 1727 and had eleven children. That same year he became assistant to his grandfather Stoddard at Northampton, and on Stoddard’s death in 1729 he became its minister.

In 1734 and 1735 Northampton was shaken by a revival, and a few years later Edwards was at the centre of the Great Awakening that swept the American colonies. In 1741 he preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the sermon he is most remembered for, reading it in a level voice from his notes. He spent years thinking hard about which religious experiences were real and which were counterfeit, and wrote A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) to explain the difference. In 1750 his own congregation, after a bitter dispute over who should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper, voted to dismiss him. He went to Stockbridge, a frontier mission, to serve a small English congregation and the Mahican and Mohawk people, and there wrote some of his greatest books, including Freedom of the Will. In 1758 he became president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton. Smallpox was in the town; he was inoculated against it, the inoculation went wrong, and he died on 22 March 1758, aged fifty-four.

Honesty requires saying something hard here. Jonathan Edwards owned enslaved people. In 1731 he bought a girl of about fourteen named Venus, and his household included other enslaved people over the years. He criticised the cruelty of the slave trade, but defended slaveholding itself. A man who could examine the human heart better than almost anyone of his time did not examine his own blind spot here, and the people who served in his house paid for it. His son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., later became an outspoken opponent of slavery. The father’s failure should be faced, not explained away.

Yet the heart of his story is still that teenage discovery. In one of his best-known sermons, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” preached in his early thirties, he put it this way: “There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.” That was what had happened to him at seventeen. He had always known about God. Then, reading a verse he had read a hundred times, he tasted.

In Their Own Words

“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, on reading 1 Timothy 1:17 at about seventeen, in his Personal Narrative (written about 1740)

Think It Through

1. Edwards had strong religious feelings as a boy that faded away. Why do you think feelings alone were not enough? Have you ever had an experience like that?
2. Edwards found one teaching about God “horrible,” and said so honestly. Is it wrong for a Christian to find parts of the Bible hard to accept? What did Edwards do with his question instead of hiding it?
3. He said there is a difference between knowing honey is sweet and tasting it. What would it mean for you to “taste” something about God that you already know?
4. Edwards resolved to work at hard questions instead of avoiding them, but he began his Resolutions by admitting he could not keep them without God’s help. Why does that opening sentence matter so much?

Read More on Ochorus

Start with the sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” where the grown-up Edwards explains what happened to him at seventeen, and then read “The Excellency of Christ,” his most beautiful sermon about Jesus. His other sermons in the library include “Pressing into the Kingdom of God,” “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence,” “The Christian Pilgrim,” “Safety, Fulness, and Sweet Refreshment in Christ,” “Christian Charity” and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” For the more ambitious, there are Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections and Freedom of the Will. The Key Teachings of Jonathan Edwards is a guide to his life and thought, including chapters on the sovereignty of God and the Resolutions. He also edited The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, the journals of a young missionary who died in his house; it is also available as The Life and Diary of David Brainerd (For Teens). His full biography is on his author page.