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Jonathan Edwards






(1703–1758)

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: his wrath towards you burns like fire: he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.

(“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”)

Jonathan Edwards, who has continued to haunt the imaginings of modern poets, received just homage from Robert Lowell, who wrote the following lines:

I love you faded,

old, exiled and afraid

to leave your last flock, a dozen

Houssatonic Indian children

The image is certainly not the one critics and readers commonly associate with the Puritan minister who gained fame during the Great Awakening, but this is indeed a true and sympathetic portrait of Edwards later in life.

Jonathan Edwards was born to a minister, the Reverend Timothy Edwards, and his wife, Esther, who hailed from East Windsor, Connecticut. He was the middle child (fifth) and only son in a family of 11. His maternal grandfather was Solomon Stoddard, “the most powerful New England clergyman of his time” (Griffin 6). For the only male child, and the son and grandson of ministers, it seemed inevitable that Jonathan would pursue a career in the ministry. Griffin considers the undue pressure the young Edwards must have felt as the “likely heir to Stoddard” and the child of “a highly intelligent, willful mother and a demanding father” (6–7). Further, the period in which he was born, which witnessed the backsliding of Puritans from the apex of the first generation and launched a revival in the form of the Great Awakening, also exerted pressure on all ministers who were charged with an exacting task. Edwards’s childhood motto, “To live with all my might, while I do live, ” is perhaps the young man’s reaction to such high expectations. He is reported to have experienced his first conversion at the age of 10 while attending one of his father’s revivals. In response, he built a “prayer booth” behind the family home and would retreat there to pray in solitude.

Primarily educated by his father, Edwards entered the Collegiate School at New Haven, now known as Yale University, when he was just shy of his 13th birthday. Four years later, in 1720, Edwards graduated, but he remained in New Haven to complete his graduate study in theology. During his two years in graduate school, 1720–22, Edwards underwent a personal spiritual struggle, the sum of which appeared in his Personal Narrative. He returned to New Haven as a tutor after a brief eight-month stint as a candidate for the ministry serving a Presbyterian church in New York. For the years 1724 and 1725, Edwards taught courses at Yale. His curriculum included learning not only about the theology of his Puritan predecessors, but of the “liberal” movements that threatened it: deism, Socinianism, Arianism, and Anglican Arminianism, as well as the most current thought in Europe, such as British empiricism and continental rationalism. His study and writings on natural philosophy and metaphysics while at Yale occasioned the critic Perry Miller to name him the “first and greatest homegrown American philosopher.” The following year, he was ordained a minister, and “to the surprise of no one, ” as Griffi n writes, he was invited to assist his prominent grandfather, Mr. Stoddard, at his church in Northampton. He was only 23.

In the following year, 1727, he married Sarah Pierrepont, who was 17. The two would create a large family of 11 who would relocate in 1751 to the wilderness of Stockbridge. In December 1729, Edwards’s sister Jerusha died of a fever; the following April, in honor of his sister, the Edwardses named their daughter Jerusha. They would follow this same tradition in 1736 when his sister Lucy’s death on August 21 was honored 10 days later by naming their daughter, born August 31, after her. Jerusha’s birth was followed by those of Sarah (1728), Ester (1732), Mary (1734), Lucy (1736), Timothy (1738), Susannah (1740), Eunice (1743), Jonathan (1745), Elizabeth (1747), and Pierpont (1750).

In Personal Narrative, Edwards confesses, “From my childhood up, my mind has been wont to be full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased; leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.” Here, Edwards encapsulates his doubts about the Puritan doctrine of the elect who alone were predestined to enjoy heaven in the hereafter while countless others, not among the elect, would suffer for eternity in hell. Although he would ultimately embrace the notion of God’s sovereignty, he “never could give an account, how, or by what means, I was thus convinced.” In writing of his own personal struggles, and the emotional or intuitive means by which he experienced his own conversion, Edwards displayed a belief in many of the primary doctrines espoused in the Great Awakening.

Chief among those beliefs was the notion of “holy affections, ” the profound spiritual feelings that attend an individual who has been awakened. In Religious Affections, Edwards developed this theory more fully. He argued in part that “a vigorous, affectionate, and fervent love of God” was the foundation for all other religious affections, which might include “an intense hatred and abhorrence of sin, fear of sin, and a dread of God’s displeasure, gratitude to God for his goodness, complacence and joy in God when God is graciously and sensibly present, and grief when he is absent, and a joyful hope when a future enjoyment of God is expected, and fervent zeal for the glory of God.” In reviewing this theory, readers can recognize key emotional reactions imagined and created during “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The intense emotional response also marked Edwards’s own conversion, which he recounted in his Personal Narrative: While outdoors, walking in his father’s fields, Edwards felt “a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God.” This feeling intensified as the days passed leaving him with the realization that his former joys and delights paled in comparison and thus never really penetrated his heart as at this moment of conversion.

Edwards became the sole pastor at Northampton after Stoddard’s death, and he maintained the prominence of both the family reputation as well as that of their church. As his biographer Griffin reports, “Two of the most important religious revivals took place during [Edwards’s] pastorate there, and Edwards was a key figure in both of them” (8). The first, referred to as “surprising conversions, ” occurred in 1734 and 1735; the second was the Great Awakening itself, which took place in the 1740s and was launched by George Whitefield. Edwards recorded the events of the “surprising conversions” in A Faithful Narrative, which appeared in print the following year, 1736. As Griffi n reveals, the tragic event of a suicide in his wife’s family promptly put an end to his widespread influence over Northampton’s youth. Sarah’s uncle, Joseph Hawley, slit his throat in 1735 in despair over “the unhappy state of his soul during a time of widespread conversions” (Griffin 8). With regard to the Great Awakening itself, Edwards welcomed Whitefield to Northampton, but his dislike for the overly emotive and impulsive aspects of Whitefield’s sermons drew strong words of criticism from the former toward the latter. Others besides Edwards had become skeptical of the authenticity of conversions that were signaled by physical signs, actions, and excessive displays of emotion (9). Nevertheless, Edwards himself contributed sermons to the movement, most notably “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and “The Future Punishment of the Wicked.”

Perry Miller writes that in 1741 Edwards was “at the height of his career and infl uence.” This was due not only to Edwards’s own participation as a minister in the Great Awakening, but also to his role in publicly defending the movement against charges from Charles Chauncy, who wrote “Enthusiasm Defined and Cautioned Against” in 1642. The central disagreement between the two ministers involves their notions of whether the mind or the heart should be the central organ through which an individual experiences and expresses the Spirit of God. Chauncy, who was educated at Harvard and the pastor of the First Church of Boston, a Congregational church, adhered to traditional theories of the soul as a tripartite being in which reason, residing in the mind, should always dominate. “The plain truth is an enlightened mind, and not raised affections, ought always to be the guide of those who call themselves men; and this, in affairs of religion, as well as other things” (Marsden, 281). In 1643, he published another pamphlet in opposition to the Great Awakening, entitled Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England.

Critics believe that Edwards was attempting a new theory of understanding how one experienced faith, and how this experience translated into a sense of the human psyche. Part of his project in developing this new theory appeared in his 1746 publication A Treatise on the Concerning Affectations. Griffi n believes that Edwards relied greatly on the theories of Thomas Shepard and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in formulating his own notions of the psychology of conversion (23). A central component of Edwards’s theory was a defi ance of the traditional belief in a divided and hierarchical soul that culminated in the mind, the organ of reason. Edwards looked instead at the unity of these faculties in the soul, thus dismissing the notion of hierarchy and separation (Griffin 24).

Ironically, although Edwards appeared as the defender of the Great Awakening, his own skepticism regarding the sincerity of the conversions occasioned by this phenomenon led him to write critiques and psychological analyses of the Awakening that would lead, by 1750, to his dismissal as pastor of the Northampton church (Griffin 10). Edwards instituted a strict policy for admission to the church that revived a practice held by early Puritans. Full membership in the church depended upon true Christian practice and a profession of faith that included evidence of a conversion. Not surprisingly, between 1744 and 1748, there was not a single applicant for full membership in Edwards’s church (Griffin 11).

Other disputes, including those in Edwards’s personal life, would also contribute to his public downfall and disgrace. One of these events was Edwards’s mismanagement in 1744 of the punishment of several youth accused of tittering over a handbook for midwives. In New England style, justice involved the creation of a committee of inquiry who would preside over the questioning, confession, and admonishment of the guilty parties. While Edwards set this form of justice in motion by calling on his congregation to form a committe of inquiry, he also defi ed the tradition by publicly announcing the names of the accused as well as those of witnesses. Unfortunately, many of the youths named by Edwards were members of prominent Northampton families, and they were outraged that their pastor would besmirch their families’ reputations in such a public forum (Griffin 12). As Griffi n notes, the ill will generated by his mishandling of the book incident remained among members of the congregation for the next four years, constituting “an easy reference point for his enemies” (12).

In the same year, Edwards’s salary was withheld by the church over disputes about his wife, Sarah’s, wardrobe. She was accused of purchasing jewelry and extravagant dress material, thus revealing her vanity, a characteristic to be shunned by a minister’s wife. Sarah Pierpont Edwards would address issues of her reputation, her position as the minister’s wife, at the time of his imminent break from the church through her own conversion. As she wrote, and Edwards later retold her tale, she experienced moments of divine light that caused her to become a religious source in her own right. In his “Apostrophe to Sarah Pierpont, ” Edwards defies the image of her as worldly and vain, suggesting instead that she values her profound relationship with God over such truck: “Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affl iction.”

When in December 1748 someone actually applied for full membership in the church but refused to offer the profession of faith that Edwards had made mandatory four years earlier, the minister found himself embroiled with congregation members. Edwards himself instigated the formal declaration of these tensions by calling a state of controversy between himself and the people. During the subsequent proceedings that lasted for nearly two years, Edwards held steadfast to his theological convictions and attempted to limit the congregation’s opposition to his religious beliefs rather than to larger issues of personal disfavor. In accordance with his desire to frame the debate over theological rather than personal issues, Edwards issued An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning the Qualifi cations Requisite to a Compleat Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church. As Griffi n reports, “The people did not read his book” (13). Nor, he states, did they attend a series of five public lectures that Edwards held in the Connecticut Valley during March 1750 (13). Just three months later, on June 22, 1750, the council voted to remove Edwards as their pastor. Edwards recalled, “Nothing would quiet ’em till they could see the Town clear of Root & Branch, Name and Remnant.”

Edwards’s dismissal did not end the controversies surrounding him, however, as his own kinsman, Ephraim Williams, Jr., balked at the mention of Edwards’s taking over the mission at Stockbridge. In 1750, after his ousting from his ministerial duties at Northampton, he became a missionary at Stockbridge, serving the Housatonic Indians. Samuel Hopkins, Edwards’s friend, sponsored him for this position, and a formal invitation was issued in December 1750 (Griffin 14). Critics wonder at Edwards’s choice in becoming the missionary preacher in Stockbridge over other offers extended to him in Canaan, Connecticut, and Lunenburg, Virginia (Griffin 13). Edwards’s cousin, Ephraim Williams, Jr., objected when Edwards’s name was proposed as a possible successor to the recently deceased John Sergeant. Williams believed Edwards was unsocial, impolitic, and too old to learn the Indians’ language. Williams lamented what a shame it was that “a head so full of divinity should be so empty of politics.”

Griffin believes that the minister’s seven years in Stockbridge “was no bower of bliss” (14). In addition to an environment made hostile by his own kinsmen, the Williams family, the town suffered from inadequate schools and untrained schoolmasters. Further, the outbreak of war in 1754 made Edwards’s time there extremely difficult. As evidenced by manuscript sermons in excess of 200, Edwards preached regularly to his Indian pastorate. He employed an interpreter, John Wauwaumpequunaunt, to aid him in communicating with his Housatonic congregation. In response to criticisms from his own cousin, Solomon Williams, regarding his policy for church membership, Edwards wrote Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated. His years in Stockbridge were surprisingly prolifi c, as he also wrote The Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, The Nature of True Virtue, and The End for Which God Created the World.

In part for these publications, as well as a family connection, Edwards was offered the presidency of the College of New Jersey (present-day Princeton University). At first, Edwards demurred, for fear that the heavy teaching load at the college would hamper any time he had available for additional research and writing. In a letter to the board of trustees, Edwards wrote that his studies “have long engaged, and swallowed up my mind, and been the chief entertainment and delight of my life.” He also worried that his health would not endure the stress, and that his 11 children could not be easily removed from their home in Stockbridge (Griffin 14). However, the college would not accept his refusal and instead offered a compromise: a reduced teaching load that only involved courses in theology and Hebrew (Griffin 16). In contrast, Aaron Burr, Edwards’s son-in-law and former president of the college, had taught all courses to one of the classes, and all the languages to the college in its entirety (Griffin 15–16).

Edwards accepted the offer and arrived at Princeton in February 1758. There had been an outbreak of smallpox in the town, and Edwards was vaccinated. Unfortunately, the vaccination proved fatal for the 54-year-old when “a secondary fever set in; and by reason of a number of pustules in his throat, the obstruction was such, that the medicines necessary to stanch the fever could not be administered.” Edwards died a month later on March 22, 1758. Edwards recognized that the strength of his talent lay in his writings. When he accepted the position at Yale, he told the trustees: “So far as I myself am able to judge of what talents I have, for benefiting my fellow creatures by word, I think I can write better than I can speak.”

 

“SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD”

On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards delivered this most famous of his sermons to a crowd at Enfield, Connecticut. From the attendant the Reverend Stephen Williams, we have learned that it was a well-received sermon that prompted “such a breathing of distress, and weeping, that the preacher was obliged to speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard” (reported in Trumbull 48). Partly because of this contemporary account, and partly because of selected editions of the sermon appearing in textbooks, most readers are only familiar with this sermon’s frightening images of hell and damnation. E. H. Cady asked, “Why has it become the classic of hellfire-and-brimstone preaching which so long shut out our view of the tender minded and philosophic Edwards? ” (61). Stuart attempts an answer to this rhetorical question in investigating the Reverend Stephen Williams’s reaction to the uplifting aspects of Edwards’s sermon: “And several souls were hopefully wrought upon that night. And oh the cheerfulness and pleasantness of their countenances that received comfort” (reported in Stuart 46). In addition to the very pervasive and effective images and depictions of hell that Edwards includes in the sermon, Stuart argues, there are moments of hope and comfort for those who repent their sins (46).

The use of fear was a tactic that Edwards had strategically deployed, as he reveals in “Preparatory Walk, ” for a particular class of audience members. “In the more unthinking people, such as husbandmen and the common sort of people who are less used to reasoning, God commonly works this conviction by begetting their minds a dreadful idea and notion of the punishment: in the more knowing and thinking men, the Holy Spirit makes more use of rational deduction, to convince them that ’tis worth their while to seek earnestly for salvation.”

In his opening reference to Deuteronomy, “their foot shall slide in due time, ” Edwards establishes a prevailing image and tone for his sermon. As he provides explication for the biblical citation, he not only makes the text understandable, but also renders it applicable to his contemporary audience. Although the text originally applies to the “wicked Israelites, ” Edwards shifts from the vague pronoun they to a more direct reference to his audience members, “wicked men” and “we.” The commonplace experience of falling, occasioned by treading in slippery places, which Edwards uses to illustrate the susceptibility of sinners to lives of eternal damnation, makes this peril seem both comprehensible and imminent. “As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once without warning.” By linking the physical act of falling with the spiritual act, Edwards lets the body be the receptacle of sin. The very weight of this sin burdens the body and makes it more susceptible to fall: “Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight.”

Man’s precarious position, his likelihood of falling at any moment and without warning, is further demonstrated by an analysis of God as the only agent who “keeps wicked men at any moment out of hell.” The fi gure of God portrayed in this section of the sermon is an all-powerful and just fi gure, but one who exercises an untold degree of strength over humans. Edwards gives numerous examples of the fruitless nature of humans’ endeavor to resist God: “There is no fortress that is any defense from the power of God.” As a metaphor for God’s power, Edwards offers the dynamic between a human and a worm: Just as easy as it is for a human to “tread on and crush a worm, ” so it is for God to “cast his enemies down to hell.” “Nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy and God’s will” prevents people from being cast into hell. Edwards proclaims the justness of sinners’ fates, and God’s action in allowing them to fall as they are prone to do, as a means of awakening the fallen members of his audience to their imminent fates.

And in this tension between God’s divine justice and man’s inherent proclivity to mortal fall Edwards echoes the Puritan view of religion. The individual is at God’s mercy to be saved from eternal damnation. Edwards constantly creates images of an open pit, or hell’s open mouth, which is ready and desirous of sinners. And yet humans ae not utterly powerless, despite the horrific image Edwards conjures of standing in limbo with God’s sword of divine justice over their heads and a fiery pit just below them. True, Edwards depicts “corrupt principles” in the “souls of wicked men” that would reign unrestrained were it not for the hand of God, but his main purpose in creating such horrifying scenes of death and endless torture is to prompt his audience members to pray to God and repent their sins. He warns that these prayers of repentance must be sincere to be heard and heeded: “Till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction.” For those who are not true believers in Christ, however, Edwards offers no hope: “They have no refuge, nothing to take hold of all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.”

It is for these people, whom Edwards calls “unconverted persons, ” that he details this “awful subject.” His desire is to make them aware and sensible to the precarious position of their souls: “There is nothing, ” Edwards proclaims, “between you and hell but the air.” For those who do not recognize God’s hand in their current situation, Edwards offers evidence: “the good state of your bodily constitution, your care of your life, and the means you use for your own preservation.” These sources of an individual’s strength are useless when faced with God’s justice, and the withdrawal of his hand from them.

All of the elements, including the earth and the sun, are only sustaining the lives of sinners at God’s “sovereign pleasure”; thus, being out of harmony with God places the unrepentant sinners or unbelievers out of harmony with their place in the world. Edwards writes: “The sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air does not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of God’s enemies.” This image of a begrudging rather than nurturing domain drastically contrasts with the dynamic of man and nature presented in Genesis, in which man is given dominion over all the living things in the various elements. For the evil, sinning human, Edwards states, even the elements are antagonistic. In the first book of Genesis, “God said ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground’ ” (Genesis 1: 26). Edwards notes the difference between this dynamic with nature and the one outlined in Genesis by stating that “God’s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve God with.” Another indirect reference to Genesis immediately follows when Edwards uses a simile to compare God’s wrath to “great waters that are damned for the present.” The impending flood, threatening with “constantly rising” waters, evokes the enormous deluge described in Genesis when God fl oods the world in his anger at man’s fall from grace.

Perhaps the most famous of all images that Edwards conjures in his sermon, the one that prompted the biographer Elisabeth D. Dodds to name it the “spider sermon, ” is that of man hanging precariously, as if on a spider’s thread, over a fire. To convey the powerless state of a sinner, whose fate relies solely on the mercy of God, Edwards writes, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fi re, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” More examples of God’s omnipotence follow in subsequent paragraphs in which Edwards compares the wrath of God to that of a king or absolute monarch. Just as Edwards discounted man’s power of resistance to God’s will, so, too, does he diminish the power exercised by kings or “the greatest earthly potentates” in comparison to “the great and almighty Creator and King of heaven and earth.” He quotes from Luke, in which mankind is advised not to fear the person who can kill the body, but the power that can kill the spirit by casting one into hell.

Edwards attempts a defi nition of eternal damnation in the following paragraph. Up until this point, hell has been an immediate, but not necessarily an infinite threat. His shift in the depiction of hell, less as a fi ery pit and more as an inconceivable eternity spent in turmoil, occurs on the brink of his final plea to his listeners to repent their sins and sincerely commit themselves to their religious faith. In imagining hell as “a long forever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul, ” Edwards shifts from the physical aspects of eternal damnation to its emotional and psychological effects. To make the concept of eternal damnation more understandable and accessible, Edwards points to those “in this congregation now hearing this discourse that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity.”

Despite his employment of numerous images to emphasize man’s helpless state as an unrepentant sinner, Edwards also claims man’s agency, or ability to change these dire circumstances, when he writes in the application section of the sermon, “The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this congregation.” Stuart identifies the “logical inconsistency” in the sermon: Edwards “went on to use the poles of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility to maintain an effective tension in everyday religious life. To some, this tension is suspect, because of its logical inconsistency. But to others, it appears singularly effective in keeping man from falling into either despair, on the one hand, or complacency, on the other” (56). He calls on members of the congregation to recognize and act upon the “extraordinary opportunity” to convert and commit themselves to Christ. If they will but listen to Christ “calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners, ” their “hearts [will be] filled with love to Him who has loved them.” Here, Edwards shifts from a characterization of God that has prevailed in the sermon as an angry and vengeful God, to one more in keeping with New Testament readings, a God of love and acceptance.

 






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