Jonathan Edwards read philosophy that puzzled grown professors while he was still a student at Yale, but it was a verse from the Bible, not a logical argument, that changed his life. He confessed that on reading 1 Timothy 1:17 he felt a sweetness in God he had never experienced before.
Born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, Edwards was the son of a pastor and grandson of the influential preacher Solomon Stoddard. He graduated from Yale while still young and, in 1726, became his grandfather’s assistant at the Congregational church of Northampton, Massachusetts, taking over as senior pastor after Stoddard’s death in 1729.
In 1727 he married Sarah Pierpont, daughter of Pastor James Pierpont, one of the founders of Yale. Sarah ran a household full of children while her husband wrote for hours on end, and the correspondence between the two reveals an affection rare for the era. The couple had eleven children.
Between 1734 and 1735, and again around 1740, Edwards’s sermons in Northampton sparked waves of conversions that spread through the American colonies, an episode that became known as the Great Awakening. In 1741, he preached the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, which became the symbol of the movement.
Like many of his time and region, Edwards owned enslaved people in his household throughout his life. In 1741, at the request of a council of pastors, he even wrote a defense of a colleague’s right to own slaves. In later writings he condemned the transatlantic slave trade as unjust, but he never broke with the practice of slavery itself nor freed those he owned. It is a contradiction that history records without mincing words.
In 1750, disagreements over who could partake of the Lord’s Supper led the Northampton church to dismiss him by vote. Edwards then went on to serve as pastor and missionary among the Mohican people (also called Mahican or Housatonic) in Stockbridge, where he wrote some of his most enduring works.
Invited in 1758 to become president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, he died a few weeks later from complications caused by a smallpox inoculation.
His writings on religious affections and the biography he wrote of the young missionary David Brainerd influenced later generations, among them William Carey, showing that rigorous thought and passion for God can go hand in hand.