Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love

1. Life

1 1 LIFE Jonathan Edwards is by now the most illustrious resident in the history of the town of Northampton, no small achievement for a little community that has harbored Calvin Coolidge, Sylvia Plath, Sojourner Truth, Sylvester Graham, and George Bancroft. Edwards trumps them all. He may be for us today one of the three or four most illustrious men in the history of pre-Revolutionary New England, standing with John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Cotton Mather. For enduring influence, he may trump these figures as well. Here are highlights of his life and career.1 1703: Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, to Timothy Edwards, a formidable Congregational minister, and Esther Stoddard Edwards, the daughter of the even more formidable Solomon Stoddard, the Congregational pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts. One of eleven Edwards children (the rest are girls), Jonathan studies a classical track with his father, who teaches other local children to supplement his ministerial salary . Nine of his sisters attend finishing school in Boston; of the eight who marry, four become the wives of ministers. 1716: Enters the Connecticut Collegiate School, later Yale College; obtains the bachelor’s degree in 1720; delivers the valedictory address, and begins graduate work. He studies Locke, Newton, and other modern philosophers and theologians, obtains a graduate degree from Yale in 1722, and serves as a Yale tutor from 1724 to 1726. In later years he attends frequent Yale commencements, gives a commencement address in 1741, and receives Yale graduates and students in his home despite quarreling with the Yale authorities over doctrinal matters. 1719: Contracts severe pleurisy, the first of many illnesses over his life, including collapses in 1725 and again in 1729, when he loses his voice; in > > life 2 1735 when he takes recuperative leave; and in the 1750s when fever lays him very low. Acquaintances find him “gaunt” and “infirm” before he reaches age forty and “skeletal” at fifty, a condition he is aware of but that his grinding workaholic habits and abstemious diet may exacerbate. 1721: Undergoes a profound and hard-won conversion that brings a consciousness of grace and an apprehension of the sublime beauty and overwhelming power of God. This permanently shapes his sense of true Christianity. He recounts this experience, upon request, in a “Personal Narrative” written in 1740. 1722: Ministers to a Presbyterian congregation in New York City until 1723 when he leaves to assume a brief Congregational pastorate in Bolton, Connecticut. Until 1726 he preaches, while serving as a tutor at Yale, in various area pulpits, including intermittently in Glastonbury, Connecticut. 1722: Begins lifelong “Miscellanies” notebooks, to which he adds “Notes on Scripture” in 1724 and the “Blank Bible” in 1730. These three compilations of notes become Edwards’s main repositories for doctrinal and social observation, analysis, and speculation. Also in 1722 he starts another lifelong effort, a “Catalogue” of the books that he purchases, reads, finds of interest, or lends out. 1723: Begins courtship of Sarah Pierpont, the teenage daughter of a prominent New Haven minister, and writes a famous idealizing “Apostrophe ” to Sarah’s lovely spirituality. They marry in 1727 and have eleven children between 1728 and 1750, all but three of them girls, all but one destined to outlive both parents. The daughters receive sound educations, including “finishing” in Boston; several become the wives of ministers. The boys graduate from Princeton rather than Yale; one, Jonathan Jr., enters the ministry. Sarah, besides mothering a large brood and running a complicated household, comes to figure prominently in Edwards’s writings about the spirituality of revivalism. 1727: Moves with Sarah to Northampton, Massachusetts, a farm community on the Connecticut River, as assistant minister to Solomon Stoddard, the illustrious and autocratic leader of the Connecticut Valley churches. Following Stoddard’s death in 1729, Edwards accepts an offer to become Northampton’s minister. He thus ascends to one of the most significant pulpits, by virtue of the town’s size and regional influence, its life 3 willingness to pay its minister well, and Stoddard’s lingering luster, in all of interior New England. 1730: Begins fully to articulate the social implications of his faith with sermons in the next few years on topics that he had previously touched upon. Among them are “The Dangers of Decline,” “Envious Men,” “The Duty of Charity to the Poor,” and “The State of Public Affairs.” These stress, inter alia, the importance of loving both God and man, humanity...