EDWARDS, JONATHAN (1703-1758), American theo logian, was born on Oct. 5, 1703, at East Windsor, Conn. His father, Timothy Edwards, was pastor of the Congregational church in East Windsor, and his mother, a daughter of Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Mass., pastor of the church where Jonathan Edwards, himself, was afterwards installed.
He showed a certain abnormal mental precocity and wrote a tract on "The Nature of the Soul" when he was ten years old. At 12 he composed a treatise on "The Habits of Spiders." He entered Yale college at 13, read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which impressed him deeply, at 14, and at 17 graduated from Yale at the head of his class of ten as valedic torian.
He remained in New Haven for two more years, studying theology, and became acting pastor of a small Presbyterian church in New York for eight months. He was then tutor in Yale for two years. In 1727 came the call to Northampton, where he won his fame and also suffered the keenest humiliation of his life.
Predestination.—He was ordained as assistant minister to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. In that same year he married Sarah Pierrepont, who was only 17, a daughter of one of the founders of Yale, a girl who combined piety with a bright, cheer ful disposition. She proved a devoted wife, an efficient house keeper, and the faithful mother of his 12 children. Two years later Solomon Stoddard died, leaving young Edwards in sole charge of one of the largest, wealthiest and most cultured congre gations in Massachusetts.
He was brought up by godly parents so that pious habits were to him as second nature. Yet somewhere in that period of study, he entered into a new and deeper sense of his personal relation to God. He would scarcely have called it conversion because he had been faced toward the light from the first. Like John Wes ley, however, his heart was "strangely warmed" until the doctrine of divine sovereignty, against which he had formerly rebelled, became a belief "exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet." It may have been so. We are told that the doctrine of "uncondi tional election," whereby certain souls are, by no act or choice of their own, predestined to eternal bliss, and other souls in similar fashion to eternal damnation, is very comforting to those who are convinced that they are numbered with the elect. When Edwards entered upon his duties as pastor of the Northampton church, he showed at once that he loved books and abstract ideas more than he loved people. He spent 13 hours a day in his study and hardly ever called upon his parishioners except in cases of extreme emergency. He inherited apparently his father's lack of amiability in that he displayed a certain intellectual satisfaction in picturing "sinners in the hands of an angry God." He seemed to find more joy in battering the strongholds of Arminianism and in rearing the stout defences of his own Calvinistic theology than in preaching good tidings to the poor, or binding up the broken-hearted.
His first public attack on Arminianism in an address at Boston in 1731 was published under the title, God Glorified in Man's Dependence. He maintained that, while it was fitting that God should in the beginning create man holy, it was of his good pleasure and "mere arbitrary grace" that any man was now made holy. He claimed that God might withhold this saving grace, if he chose, without any disparagement to his moral per fection. He insisted steadily that men had no rights which a just and holy God was under moral obligations to respect.
The fiery sermons of Edwards had an immediate effect upon his hearers, their own sense of the imminence of hell making them susceptible. In his Life of Edwards, A. V. G. Allen indi cates the conditions in Northampton at that time. "A town predisposed to religion by all its antecedents; a moment in its history when no great external interest preoccupied the minds of the people ; an isolated town where the want of healthy amusements had a tendency to breed as a substitute the merely vulgar forms of immorality." Fettered Will and Choice.—Within six months 30o new members were received into Edwards's own church, and there was a similar situation elsewhere. Hundreds of people were turned from lives of evil-doing, but in the light of certain larger considerations which must enter into any just appraisal of "the Great Awakening," this can not be regarded as an unmixed blessing. The particular type of conversion, singled out and exalted until it would almost seem that other modes of entrance into Christian life were deemed spurious, was abnormal. It was far less wholesome than the type of conversion advocated by Horace Bushnell in his Christian Nurture. And to compare Edwards with another great religious leader, born in the same year, "the necessity of conversion was asserted by John Wesley, the Founder of Methodism, with a vigour and success which Calvinism could not rival, embarrassed as it was by the prior distinction between the elect and the non-elect which Wesley totally rejected." Edwards's attempt to set that notion upon its feet again led to a confusion in New England theology which was a millstone upon its neck for many years. There was an incon sistency in his teaching which the discriminating people of his own day must have detected. He declaimed against "the freedom of the will," but went about calling upon men everywhere to use their wills in forsaking their sins and choosing the Christian way of life. He insisted that no man had power to repent (unless he was fortunate enough to have been foreordained to repentance), yet he urged men with all his might to repent and turn to the Saviour. He preached the terrors of hell, even to young children. "As innocent as young children seem to be to us, yet if they are out of Christ they are in God's sight young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers." Yet he and his wife cheerfully brought into the world 12 children of their own and lived with them apparently on terms of friendly, affectionate intercourse.
His tedious discussion of The Freedom of the Will, commonly regarded as his magnum opus, impresses the modern reader as a solemn bit of special pleading, rather than a disinterested effort to reach the truth. His methods of biblical interpretation as judged by the more competent scholarship of our own day are hardly worthy of consideration or of respect. He felt that he must demolish the freedom of the will in order to cut the ground from under the feet of his Arminian opponents. If the will were free, in the sense that a man can choose his way, thus giving evidence of a self-determining power, the people in their arrogance would despise the Calvinistic doctrines which spring from the idea of God's absolute sovereignty and his unconditional election of certain souls to eternal life. One of the foremost theologians in the American pulpit, George A. Gordon, has said of him, "No single treatise of Edwards can to-day commend itself to a free and informed mind. In his Freedom of the Will, the Religious Affections, the Nature of Virtue, God's final End in Creation, the Christian Church can not follow him as a whole and those who insist upon all or none, do their best to make it none." Dismissed from Northampton.—In there came the open rupture between this pastor and his congregation. Two causes for this dissension have ordinarily been assigned. First, a badly managed case of discipline, where the pastor instituted proceed ings against a number of his young people for circulating "im pure books." However just or unjust his estimate of certain popular volumes may have been, he managed to alienate the affection and interest of nearly all the young people of the town.
The other cause was his attitude toward "the Halfway Cove nant," by which church members not consciously "converted" were not considered far enough from the Kingdom of God to be excluded from having their children admitted to the privileges of one sacrament, while they were so far outside a state of grace as to be debarred themselves from participating in the other sacra ment at the Lord's table. Edwards stood for an even more rigor ous exclusion and this meant a clash with established usage. The reasons for the opposition of the church lay deeper than these two causes. There was a ground-swell of dissent from the violent expressions employed against those who had not experienced what he regarded as thorough-going "conversion" and a profound distrust as to the wholesome influence of much of the teaching which had accompanied the Great Awakening. The effects of his overdone emphasis upon the fear of hell as a source of motive and of his low estimate of the human factor in redemption were coming home to roost. The members of the church voted by a majority of more than 200 to 23 to dismiss the pastor and the church council approved the action of the church. Then the town voted that Edwards should not be permitted to preach again in that community.
In 1757 his son-in-law, Aaron Burr, president of the College of New Jersey, died quite suddenly. This institution had shown much more sympathy with the revival which Edwards sponsored than either Harvard or Yale. It was natural, therefore, that two days after the death of President Burr, Jonathan Edwards was elected president of what is now Princeton university. It was an attractive call, yet he hesitated about accepting it. His reluc tance sprang from his desire to complete a History of the Work of Redemption which would set forth his theological conceptions as a finished whole. It may be just as well for his own fame and for the Christian religion that this projected work was never brought out.
He entered immediately upon his duties, preaching for several Sundays in the College hall and giving out "questions in Divinity" to the senior class. His period of service, however, was very brief. Smallpox was epidemic in New Jersey. The physician counselled inoculation and Edwards, with the approval of the college author ities, was inoculated on Feb. 13. For a time the symptoms indi cated a speedy recovery, but there came a change for the worse and on March 22, 1758, he died in his fifty-fifth year. His wife died the following September.
Notable tributes to the vigour and range of his intellect in dealing with metaphysical problems have been paid by scholarly men on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an earnest, sincere, devoted Christian, according to the methods and standards of the period in which he wrought. His work is to be judged in the light of religious conceptions prevalent at that time; the potent influence which it exerted occasions wonder rather than grateful appreciation. His most sympathetic biographer concludes his accurate and kindly review with these significant words—"The great wrong which Edwards did, which haunts us as an evil dream throughout his writings, was to assert God at the expense of humanity." BIBLIOGRAPHY of the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, A.M., Bibliographyof the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, A.M., compiled originally by Samuel Hopkins, revised and enlarged by John Hawksley (1815) ; S. E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (183o) ; J. Tracey, The Great Awakening (1842) ; A. V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (1889) ; H. N. Gardiner, "The Early Idealism of Jonathan Edwards," Phil. Rev., vol. ix., pp. (i oo) ; H.
Churchill King, "Jonathan Edwards as Philosopher and Theologian," Hartford Seminary Rec., vol. xiv., pp. (19o3) ; John De Witt, Jonathan Edwards: A Study (191 2) ; W. Lyon Phelps, Some Makers of American Literature (1923). (C. R. BR.)