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Authors
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
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Yale University Press is in the process of publishing a complete edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards. Some of the editors of this project have issued A Jonathan Edwards Reader (1995), the best single-volume collection of Edwards’s writings. Also useful are two recent collections of essays: Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout’s edited Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (1988) and Stephen J. Stein’s edited Jonathan Edwards’s Writings (1996). David Levin’s Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (1969) includes Samuel Hopkins’s Life and Character of the Late Rev. Mr. Jonathan Edwards (1765). Perry Miller’s Jonathan Edwards (1949) and essays included in Errand into the Wilderness (1956) are indispensable. The best biographies are George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003) and Philip F. Gura’s Jonathan Edwards.: America’s Evangelical (2005). Daniel B. Shea Jr. includes a discussion of the Personal Narrative in his Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (1968). Patricia J. Tracy Considers the implications of his career in Jonathan Edwards, Pastor (1980).
Born near Hartford, Connecticut, to a minister and his wife, the daughter of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of the most influential religious men in New England, Jonathan Edwards was groomed to follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps. A studious and perceptive boy, Edwards was first educated at home and entered Yale College when he was thirteen and stayed to read theology after graduating four years later. He maintained a disciplined schedule, rising at 4:00 a.m., studying for thirteen hours, and taking a walk each day. He moved to Northampton to assist his grandfather and, when Stoddard died, was named his successor. Edwards wished to convert his congregation from believers who understood Christian logic to Christians who were moved by their beliefs. He wanted his parishioners to feel the "absolute sovereignty" of God and to delight in it, which in turn would produce an exaltation characteristic of religious revivalism. From 1734 to 1750 this religious fervor called "The Great Awakening" spread throughout the eastern coast. But when Edwards publicly named those who had decided to return to their original way of worshipping, the town turned against him and dismissed him from the church. He served as a missionary to the Housatonnuck Indians in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for seven years and then accepted the position of president at the College of New Jersey, later called Princeton. He died three months later of smallpox. Edwards's works include A Divine and Supernatural Light (1734), Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), and Personal Narrative (1765).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Both A Divine and Supernatural Light and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God show Edwards responding to an important change in Euro-American intellectual culture. The "Age of Reason" has come to America from England and the Continent, and New England Calvinists must respond to it and speak its language. These two sermons by Edwards, read together, suggest the range of his intellect and rhetorical skill and his importance as one of the great codifiers of Calvinist theology, as well as a central figure in its eighteenth-century revival.
1. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often called a "fire and brimstone" sermon. But what strategies and structure does it share with A Divine and Supernatural Light? Some readers have difficulty imagining how these two sermons could come from the same mind and how Edwards could see no contradiction between them. Discuss how the main themes of these works might coexist and even cohere.
2. In Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, read carefully the two famous paragraphs beginning with "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked . . ." What words are used repeatedly in these paragraphs and to what effect? How does this passage redevelop and intensify themes and language which we encountered in earlier, calmer moments of this sermon?
3. In the NAAL selections, Edwards frequently uses the word "sweetness." What does he mean by it? If the term is imprecise somehow, why does this consummately careful and prodigiously educated Calvinist theologian resort to it?
