Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (1703 -1758) was the greatest theologian and philosopher of British American Puritanism, stimulator of the religious revival known as the “Great Awakening,” and one of the forerunners of the age of Protestant missionary expansion in the 19th century. 

Jonathan was the fifth child and only son among 11 children; he grew up in an atmosphere of Puritan piety, affection, and learning. He was both the son and the granson of pastors. After a rigorous schooling at home, he entered Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of 13. He was graduated in 1720 but remained at New Haven for two years, studying divinity. The manuscripts that survive from his student days exhibit Edwards’s remarkable powers of observation and analysis.

Edwards did not accept his theological inheritance passively. From his childhood on, his mind “had been full of objections” against the doctrine of predestination—i.e., that God sovereignly chooses some to salvation but rejects others to everlasting torment. Though he gradually worked through his intellectual objections, it was only with his conversion (early in 1721) that he came to a “delightful conviction” of divine sovereignty, and to a “new sense” of God’s glory revealed in Scripture and in nature.

Under the influence of Puritan and other Reformed pastors, the Cambridge Platonists, and British philosopher-scientists such as Newton and Locke, Edwards began to sketch in his manuscripts the outlines of a “Rational Account” of the doctrines of Christianity. He reasoned from the inconceivability of absolute Nothing to the existence of God as the eternal omnipresent Being. It was also inconceivable to him that anything should exist (even universal Being) apart from consciousness, with the universe depending for its being every moment on the knowledge and creative will of God.