A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards

George M. Marsden

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780802802200
• eBook ISBN: 9781467419109
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Jonathan Edwards is one of the most extraordinary figures in American history. Arguably the most brilliant theologian ever born on American soil, Edwards (1703–1758) was also a pastor, a renowned preacher, a missionary to the Native Americans, a biographer, a college president, a philosopher, a loving husband, and the father of eleven children.
George M. Marsden -- widely acclaimed for his magisterial large study of Edwards -- has now written a new, shorter biography of this many-sided, remarkable man.  A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards is not an abridgment of Marsden's earlier award-winning study but is instead a completely new narrative based on his extensive research. The result is a concise, fresh retelling of the Edwards story, rich in scholarship yet compelling and readable for a much wider audience, including students.
Known best for his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Jonathan Edwards is often viewed as a proponent of fire, brimstone, and the wrath of God. As Marsden shows, however, the focus of Edwards's preaching was not God's wrath but rather his overwhelming and all-encompassing love. Marsden also rescues Edwards from the high realms of intellectual history, revealing him more comprehensively through the lens of his everyday life and interactions. Further, Marsden shows how Edwards provides a window on the fascinating and often dangerous world of the American colonies in the decades before the American Revolution.
Marsden here gives us an Edwards who illumines both American history and Christian theology, an Edwards that will appeal to readers with little or no training in either field. This short life will contribute significantly to the widespread and growing interest in Jonathan Edwards.
 

CHAPTER ONE

Edwards, Franklin, and Their Times

At the beginning of October 1723 two remarkable young New Englanders, unknown to each other, dearly hoped to settle in the city of New York. Had they both succeeded, the story of early America would include dramatic accounts of close interactions and conflicts between the two most renowned colonial-born figures of the era. New York City, a town of less than ten thousand, might not have been big enough for the both of them. As it turned out, the New York hopes of both Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards were quickly dashed, and the two probably never met.

Two Young Men in British America

Benjamin Franklin’s New York quest is part of a familiar tale. Not quite eighteen, he broke his printer’s apprenticeship with his brother James and secretly embarked on a sloop bound for New York. After delays due to contrary winds, he eventually arrived at the formerly Dutch seaport only to find that the sole printer in town, William Bradford, needed no help. Bradford nonetheless suggested that the young man try his luck in Philadelphia, where Bradford’s son was a printer and looking for help. The rest is legendary.

During the same weeks that Franklin was visiting New York, Jonathan Edwards, having spent the summer at his parents’ home in East Windsor, Connecticut, was holding out a last hope to return to the city where he had spent the previous fall and winter. Just turning twenty on October 5, 1723, he had already served as an interim pastor in that cosmopolitan town not far to the south. The young man’s months in New York were among the sweetest in his memory, and he had formed some deep personal attachments. He was hoping he might be called back there as the regular pastor of the city’s Presbyterian church. But the existence of such a position depended on first healing a schism between the English and Scottish factions of Presbyterians in the city. In October a delegation sent by Edwards’s alma mater, Yale College, reported that the schism could not be healed. There was no opening for Edwards. He would have to wait four more years before finding a venue suited to his high personal and spiritual ambitions.

Franklin and Edwards, although about as different in both temperament and commitments as they could be, also had a lot in common. They were both products of the Calvinist culture of New England, and they both came of age in the eighteenth century, when it was an open question as to how the ways of the old Puritan experiment could survive in the self-confident modern world of the British Empire and the Enlightenment. Franklin and Edwards responded to this juxtaposition of eighteenth-century British modernity and New England’s earlier Puritan heritage in almost opposite ways. They represented two sides of the same coin in the emerging American culture during the era before the American Revolution. Each grew to be one of the most influential figures in the British colonial culture of the mid-1700s. Each is better understood if we keep in mind that he lived in the same relatively small colonial world as the other and dealt with many of the same issues.

In the case of Jonathan Edwards it is especially helpful to be reminded that his life paralleled that of the pre-revolutionary Franklin. Edwards died at age fifty-four in 1758, at a time when no one envisioned the coming break with Great Britain. Franklin lived until 1790, so we remember him as a revolutionary. If he also had died in his mid-fifties (and he did almost die while crossing the Atlantic in 1757), we would have a very different picture of him. He would still be remembered as a great wit, as British America’s most famous scientist and inventor, especially for his electrical experiments, as an ingeniously practical civic leader, and as prophet of inter-colonial unity. Yet he would also have been a figure always loyal to the British Crown (he, in fact, did not give up that loyalty until the eve of the revolution), and as a slave owner (until 1781), considerably less progressive in some of his social views than the Franklin we usually remember.

Edwards and Franklin, though opposite in temperament, were both sons of pious New England Calvinist families at a time when their heritage faced a severe crisis. Each was precocious and, growing up in an era when print dominated the media, each read everything he could get his hands on. Each as an extraordinarily curious boy delved into the mysteries and rigors of the theological volumes in his father’s library. In their teens each admired the witty writings of England’s Spectator, edited by Addison and Steele. Each soon realized that the Calvinist theology that dominated New England’s intellectual life was sadly out of date according to fashionable British standards. Edwards and Franklin each spent a lifetime dealing with the clash of these two worlds. Each worked vigorously to use what he saw as essential in his New England heritage to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing modern age.

If we think of the Puritans as one of America’s first immigrant communities, then the opposing reactions of Edwards and Franklin to the dramatic transitions of their era becomes the prototype of a classic American story. A community founded on faith as much as on ethnicity divides within itself over how to adapt to the ways of a new era. In later times we would say these conflicts were about “Americanization,” although in the era of our protagonists it was more a debate about becoming British, or “Anglicization” as it is sometimes called. Franklin embraced the progressive culture of his day with a vengeance, so much so that he forsook family, religion, and region to seek his own fortune. Edwards faced many of the same challenges but held onto the old faith. He did so not as a reactionary but was, like Franklin, an innovator. His experience of intensely held Calvinism in the era of the cool reason of the Enlightenment resulted in remarkable creativity.

Young Edwards may have read the younger Franklin. In May 1722 (the year before they both wished to settle in New York) Ben’s creation, Silence Dogood, made her fourth appearance in James Franklin’s New England Courant. In all likelihood this issue of the controversial paper soon found its way to New Haven, Connecticut, where Edwards was a student at Yale, since the subject of the Widow Dogood’s ridicule was Harvard College, already Yale’s archrival. Following the example of John Bunyan’s popular Protestant classic, Pilgrim’s Progress, the widow reported that she had fallen asleep and had awakened in a land in which “all places resounded with the fame of the Temple of Learning.” Approaching this famed institution, she found its gate guarded by “two sturdy porters named Riches and Poverty, and the latter obstinately refused to give entrance to any who had not gain’d the favour of the former.” Inside the Temple, the ignorance and idleness of the students was covered up by their dabbling in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Widow Dogood, curious to find why so many flocked to study in the “Temple of Theology,” soon discovered Pecunia (money) lurking behind a curtain. The students, “following the contrivances of Plagius,” copied into their own works the words of the popular anti-Calvinist Anglican preacher, John Tillotson, known for his eloquence.

Franklin’s satire would have amused Edwards, since Yale students stood ready to believe the frequent rumors of doctrinal laxity at Harvard. Edwards’s father was a conservative Connecticut clergyman and had been a firm supporter of his colony’s alternative to Harvard ever since the younger school’s founding in 1701. Jonathan himself had no illusions about New England college students. Even though the majority of his fellow Yale students were, as he was, studying theology, he found most of them to be a rowdy bunch. He could easily imagine that things were even worse at Harvard.

Clever satirist that he was, Franklin often made Widow Dogood speak as though she were a country conservative shocked at what she found in fashionable Boston. In one early contribution she noted that “among the many reigning vices of the town” to be deplored was the sin of pride, “a vice most hateful to God and man”—especially, she lamented, the growing evidence of “pride of apparel.” This vice was most pronounced among her own sex, as evidenced by the ridiculous fashion of “hoop petticoats,” which she said were so massive that they might be stacked at the local fort to scare off invaders. In an earlier day, plain dress had served as an identifying feature of Puritan New England. The early settlers deplored ostentatious displays of wealth. Now times were changing, as many of the third- or fourth-generation heirs to the Puritan heritage, even if still subscribing to the formal tenets of the old faith, were dropping its austere forms and adopting English fashions, no matter how extravagant or bizarre.

Much of what the clergyman’s widow said deploring “pride of apparel,” modern styles, and displays of wealth sounded just like sermons that either young Jonathan or young Ben might have heard. New England’s Congregational clergy were the most revered men in the provinces. They were the best educated and had long held a near-monopoly on public speaking, preaching at least two sermons a week. Their churches were “established” as state institutions supported by taxes. They were usually full, due to either law or custom. Clergy also spoke often in weekday lectures and on public occasions, such as election days. They all professed Calvinist orthodoxy, but they differed in temperament between those who were more forward-looking moderates, more lenient on matters such as styles of dress, and stricter conservatives. In outlying areas such as the Edwardses’ Connecticut, or in western Massachusetts where Jonathan’s famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, presided, conservatives held firm control. Boston was more cosmopolitan and also more divided. Aging Increase Mather and his anything-but-silent son Cotton Mather, whose Essays to Do Good inspired Franklin’s pseudonym, led the Boston conservative pastors who lamented that Puritanism’s glory years were becoming dim memories.

The rise of newspapers in Boston of the 1700s had the potential to challenge the clergy’s dominance in public communication, a potential that became a reality when James Franklin established the New England Courant in 1721. Patterning his paper on the witty London Spectator, he immediately used his paper to attack Cotton Mather. The occasion later proved to be notoriously ill-chosen, although at the time the merits of the case were far from clear. Mather was championing inoculations as a way to reduce risk during a devastating smallpox epidemic, and Franklin sharply assailed him for what seemed to him a dangerous experiment. Mather, despite his rigid theological conservatism and nostalgia for the old days, knew more about contemporary science than anyone else in the colony, an expertise that had gained him membership in England’s prestigious Royal Society. The first source of Mather’s knowledge about inoculations was from Mather’s slave, Onesimus, who assured him they were a common practice in Africa. Mather, a person of insatiable curiosity, not only confirmed Onesimus’s testimony from other slaves, but soon read of the success of such practices in the Ottoman Empire as reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Many Bostonians, including most of the physicians, opposed Mather’s inoculation program. Someone even firebombed Mather’s house. James Franklin, capitalizing on the controversy, helped lead this chorus of opposition probably largely because Mather represented the conservative establishment. In June of 1722, after the smallpox crisis had passed, the establishment struck back. The Massachusetts General Court, apparently looking for an excuse to silence the insubordinate Courant, threw James into jail for a month for some seemingly mild sarcasm about the government.

Ben Franklin found himself temporarily in charge of publishing the Courant, and simultaneously Silence Dogood shed her guise of a conservative. In the first issue after James’s imprisonment, the widow’s entire letter was a long excerpt from the London Journal on freedom of speech. “This sacred privilege is so essential to free governments,” she quoted, “that security of property, and freedom of speech always go together; and in those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call any thing else his own.” This quotation reminds us that young Franklin would eventually grow to be a revolutionary, but as he and his readers were well aware, the seeds of revolution had been planted by their Puritan forebears themselves. Silence Dogood’s quotation goes on to cite the memory of “the Court of King Charles the First,” in which “his wicked ministry procured a proclamation, to forbid the people to talk of parliaments, which those traitors had laid aside.”

Franklin thus invoked the most momentous political event in Puritan history. In 1649 English Puritans and the parliament under Oliver Cromwell emerged as some of the first modern revolutionaries when they executed King Charles I as a traitor. In New England, the revolutionary heritage persisted. In 1689 New Englanders celebrated the “Glorious Revolution,” when the Protestant prince, William of Orange, replaced the Catholic James II. Out of that second revolution had grown what in England became known as the “commonwealth tradition” (Cromwell had overseen a Puritan “commonwealth” before English kings were restored), which championed principles of liberty over against tyranny. By mentioning Charles I, the widow was pointing to the irony of the Boston Court’s suppression of political criticism: the heirs to Puritanism were much less open to dissent when they themselves held power than when they lacked it.

Silence Dogood followed this salvo with a letter two weeks later deploring hypocrisy. As in earlier pieces, she had chosen a topic that was a staple of New England sermons. Now, however, she turned the familiar theme into an attack on the close alliance between the clergy and colonial officials, who might use pious language for their own purposes. “A little religion,” she pointed out in an aphorism that still rings true, “like a little honesty, goes a great way in courts”—that is, in politics. This was especially true “if the country…is noted for the purity of religion.”

Jonathan Edwards would have agreed with Franklin’s views on hypocrisy in principle, even though as a son and grandson of ministers who was entering the ministry himself he was a beneficiary of New England’s political-religious establishment. In later life, even though his political instincts were conservative, he was ready to criticize magistrates who hid behind a mask of piety.

Yet if Jonathan happened to read the Courant of July 22, 1722, he may have become suspicious about the widow’s own piety. Franklin began her letter with a version of a classic New England sermonic question: “whether a commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane.” Schoolboys like Edwards debated such issues. Yet in his zeal to expose the ruin that hypocrites in public positions might bring to an entire country, Franklin minimized the dangers of open irreverence by private individuals. “A notoriously profane person in a private capacity,” Silence opined, “[only] ruins himself, and perhaps forwards the destruction of a few of his equals.”

Here, slipped in unobtrusively, was a capsule of Franklin’s life philosophy that we know so well from later writings. To Franklin it seemed self-evident that moral principles should be determined only by weighing the consequences of actions. For instance, in his Autobiography, when he recounts his early attempts at reaching “moral perfection” by following a list of virtues (such as Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, and the like), he redefines the virtue of “Chastity” in a way that allows for wide personal freedom: “Rarely use venery [gratification of sexual desire] but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or injury of your or another’s peace or reputation.” Franklin thus articulated what became one of the most pervasive American traditions, one that countless people would use, as he did, to free themselves from religiously-based moral strictures of their various communities of origin.

Edwards, on the other hand, exemplifies a very different but equally American story. Edwards’s story, like that of countless since, was one of meeting the challenge of remaining loyal to a nurturing traditionalist community, even when the attractions of cosmopolitan modern life, like a centrifugal force, threaten to pull the community apart and destroy its distinctiveness. As in most such communities, the counteracting centripetal force that held it together was not only loyalty to family, friends, and the community itself, as inestimably important as those were, but also a loyalty to a transcendent religious ideal. Faith and trust in God made loyalty to the community not just a matter of personal choice, but rather a matter of high principle seen as linked to nothing less than one’s eternal destiny.

An Immigrant Community’s Religious Heritage

By the very nature of the case, there is no fully typical story of American experience, so as we might expect, the community into which Edwards grew up had some singular traits. The Puritans who settled New England were the first and the largest, and therefore by far the most influential, of the ethno-religious communities in the British colonies. Further, the unusual circumstance of having been usually a persecuted minority in their home country of England but an overwhelming majority in their American settlements created some long-term tensions that we need to consider in more detail.

While the tens of thousands of Puritans who left for America in the 1630s were part of an oppressed religious group in England, they had long aspired to rule. At the time, in the midst of well over a century of warfare and struggle between Protestants and Catholics that followed the Reformation, most people took for granted that a nation should have only one religion. If one religion was the only true one, most people reasoned, then it made no sense that the state should tolerate false substitutes. Such tolerance, the reasoning continued, would result in the state failing to protect its citizens from the greatest danger of all, that of being betrayed in the matter of their eternal life. Protestant success accordingly depended upon winning the sympathies of a nation’s rulers. The Puritans were “Reformed,” or part of the Calvinist movement (named for the sixteenth-century Genevan reformer John Calvin) that was the first international movement for revolution and national reform of modern times.

In this Reformation battle for the loyalties of monarchs and hence their nations, England itself was a peculiar case. In 1534, less than two decades after the Reformation began, King Henry VIII decided to change churches in order to change wives. England thus became Protestant, but its reasons for doing so were so weak that it was particularly liable to revert to Catholicism. In fact it did just that from 1553-1558 under Queen Mary, one of Henry’s daughters who remained Catholic despite her father’s reform efforts. Under another daughter, Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, who reigned from 1558-1603, a compromise set the Church of England on an unusual course. Its theology would be Protestant, but its forms would resemble Catholicism. Bishops would govern the church, and its worship would include much of the imagery, pomp, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Edwards, Franklin, and Their Times
• 2. Wrestling with God
• 3. Transitions and Challenges
• 4. Awakening
• 5. An American Revolution
• 6. Drama on the Home Front
• 7. A World in Conflict
• 8. A Missionary, a Scholar, and a President
• Conclusion: What Should We Learn from Edwards?
• Suggestions for Further Reading