Jonathan Edwards

Life and work

Edwards entered Yale College at age thirteen and became a pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts, succeeding his grandfather Solomon Stoddard. In 1734–35, his preaching sparked an intense local revival, which he documented in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, a text that circulated widely and influenced the broader transatlantic Great Awakening.

Edwards's most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), preached with vivid, unrelenting imagery of divine judgment, became emblematic (sometimes to Edwards's later disadvantage) of the Great Awakening's revivalist intensity, though Edwards himself was a careful, philosophically sophisticated theologian rather than a simple hellfire preacher.

Edwards was ultimately dismissed from his Northampton pulpit in 1750 over a dispute regarding standards for church membership and communion, after which he served as a missionary to Native Americans at Stockbridge, during which period he wrote some of his most important philosophical theology, including Freedom of the Will.

In 1758 Edwards was appointed president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but died of complications from a smallpox inoculation just weeks after taking office. He is widely regarded as colonial America's most significant philosophical theologian.

In their own words

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider... abhors you.""Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," 1741

Describes a transformative sense of "the glory of the divine Being" that shaped his theology of beauty and God.Personal Narrative

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Jonathan Edwards