Jonathan Edwards

“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, recounting his conversion¹

Overview

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was an American Congregationalist Puritan pastor, missionary, and theologian, ordained at Northampton, Massachusetts as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard and later a leading figure of the First Great Awakening.² He is remembered particularly for two treatises that remain live sources in Reformed theology, Religious Affections (1746) and Freedom of the Will (1754), and for an original account of God’s own self-beatitude. Samuel Parkison writes that “few theologians have made a greater impact on evangelical theology in the Americas like the Northampton pastor Jonathan Edwards.”³

Life and Ministry

Edwards was born October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, to Timothy Edwards, a Congregationalist minister, and Esther Stoddard Edwards, the daughter of Solomon Stoddard.² He entered Yale at age twelve in 1716 and, in his final years there, described a conversion experience reading 1 Timothy 1:17: “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. Never any words of scripture seemed to me as these words did. I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.”¹

In 1727 he was ordained at Northampton as assistant to Stoddard and married Sarah Pierpont the same year; they had eleven children.² Stoddard’s death in February 1729 left Edwards sole minister of one of the colony’s largest congregations.²

Edwards’s preaching on justification by faith alone at Northampton in 1734 touched off a local revival that, by the early 1740s, joined George Whitefield’s and Gilbert Tennent’s itinerant preaching in the wider movement historians call the First Great Awakening.⁴ Edwards credited the 1734 sermon as “the beginning of the late work of God in this place,” and recorded that by December “the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully to work amongst us,” so that “there was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.”⁴ He defended the revival’s authenticity against critics who dismissed its emotional intensity as mere enthusiasm in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1742).⁴

Edwards’s Northampton ministry ended in dismissal. Stoddard had practiced open communion, admitting to the Lord’s Table anyone of respectable life regardless of a credible profession of conversion, on the theory that communion could itself be a converting ordinance; Edwards came to reject this practice and required a profession of saving faith for admission, breaking publicly with a policy the congregation had followed for decades. The dispute cost him the pulpit: the church voted in 1750 to dissolve his pastorate.²

Edwards then moved to the frontier settlement of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he ministered to a small English congregation and served as missionary to the Housatonic people; the reduced pastoral demands gave him time to complete Freedom of the Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758).² In early 1758 he accepted election as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University; he died there on March 22, 1758, of a fever following an inoculation against smallpox, at the age of fifty-four.²

Theological Contribution

Freedom of the Will

Edwards’s Freedom of the Will (originally titled A Careful and Strict Enquiry 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) argues that the will always follows the strongest present desire or motive, so that choice remains genuinely free even though it is also determined. Edwards writes: “The faculty of the will is that faculty or power or principle of mind by which it is capable of choosing: an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing or choice,” and “a man never, in any instance, wills anything contrary to his desires, or desires anything contrary to his will.”⁵ Matthew Barrett describes this as Edwards’s “freedom of inclination,” set against an Arminian “freedom of indifference” holding that the will can choose against every motive acting on it, a view Edwards judged incoherent since it makes the will’s determination an effect without a cause.⁶ Edwards’s companion treatise, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), argues that Adam’s sin is imputed to all his posterity, leaving fallen human beings with what Edwards calls an “unfailing propensity” to moral evil that only the Spirit’s work in regeneration can overcome.⁵

Religious Affections

Religious Affections (1746), Edwards’s account of how to distinguish genuine conversion from religious excitement provoked by the Great Awakening’s revivals, argues that true religion consists chiefly in holy affections of the heart rather than in passing emotion or in correct doctrine held at arm’s length. Augustus Strong called it “Jonathan Edwards’s Confessions, as much as if it were directly addressed to the Deity,” quoting biographer Alexander Allen’s judgment that it is “a work which will not suffer by comparison with the work of great teachers in theology, whether ancient or modern,” and noting that Edwards’s own grandson Timothy Dwight, later Yale’s president, regarded it as most worthy of preservation next to the Bible.⁷ Herman Bavinck cites the treatise directly in his own account of regeneration, noting that Edwards spoke there of “principles of nature” implanted in the regenerate.⁸

God’s Self-Beatitude and the Beatific Vision

Edwards’s theology proper centers on an account of God’s own eternal happiness in himself, and how it grounds the Trinity’s inner life. Samuel Parkison calls Edwards “nothing if not a truly creative theologian” on this point: Edwards inherited elements of the doctrine of the beatific vision from Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, while advancing it, chiefly in a 1735 sermon on Romans 2:10, with a pneumatological emphasis building on John Owen’s earlier christocentric account.³ For Edwards, “God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself,” a “perfectly beholding and infinitely loving, and rejoicing in, his own essence and perfections” that Edwards makes the ground of the Trinity’s eternal generation and procession.⁹ Parkison quotes Oliver Crisp and Kyle Strobel’s summary of the resulting picture: “Edwards’s God… is infinite perfection that wills to overflow so that others can partake in the fullness of this perfection… an overflow of knowledge to be both perceived and loved according to its greatness, goodness, and beauty.”⁹

Historical Significance

Edwards’s writings gave rise to the New England Theology, a school of thought among his Congregationalist successors that dominated New England theological debate into the early nineteenth century before declining sharply after the Civil War.¹⁰ Its early phase, the “New Divinity” of Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790) and Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), gave way to the New Haven theology of Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858); Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight, as Yale’s president, and Jonathan Edwards Jr., who had studied under Bellamy, carried the tradition further from Edwards’s own positions, extending Bellamy’s governmental theory of the atonement, a view historically associated with Arminianism rather than Reformed orthodoxy, and treating sin more as an accumulation of individual acts than as an underlying state of the will.¹⁰ Herman Bavinck traces one specific point of departure to Edwards himself: Edwards’s denial of the immediate imputation of Adam’s sin and of Christ’s righteousness “had the effect of increasingly leading New England theology along the lines of” Placaeus (Josué de la Place), the French Reformed theologian whose mediate-imputation view the Synod of Charenton had condemned in 1645, a century before Edwards’s own departure.¹¹

The 1750 Northampton dismissal, provoked by Edwards’s rejection of his grandfather’s open-communion practice, cost him the pulpit of one of colonial New England’s most prominent congregations, even as the Great Awakening he had helped lead continued to shape American religious life for generations afterward.²

Related Doctrines

References

Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” in Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn, vol. 16 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 792, quoted in Samuel G. Parkison, The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God, ed. Matthew Barrett, Contemplating God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2026), chap. 1, “More Eternal,” 16-17. ↩ ↩²
Wikipedia, s.v. “Jonathan Edwards (theologian),” accessed September 9, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Edwards_(theologian). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Samuel G. Parkison, To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), chap. 4, “A Cloud of Witnesses, Part Two: Reformation and Post-Reformation Historical Witness,” 131-32. ↩ ↩²
Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 48-50. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 112-13. ↩ ↩²
Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” 114. ↩
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 826. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 18, “Calling and Regeneration,” n. 30: “Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. J. E. Smith (1746; repr., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 206 (part III, 1), spoke of ‘principles of nature,’ but added ‘for want of a word of more determinate signification.’” ↩
Parkison, To Gaze upon God, 132-33. ↩ ↩²
B. B. Warfield, “Edwards and the New England Theology,” in Studies in Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1988), 515-38; Mark A. Noll, “New England Theology,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell. Neither work is held in the Theopedia Library; kept from the article’s prior citations as an uncontested historical characterization rather than newly verified against the library. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation”; chap. 12, “The Fallen World,” n. 42 (dating Placaeus’s mediate-imputation view and the Synod of Charenton’s 1645 condemnation of it). ↩