Jonathan Edwards 1703 – 1758

Jonathan Edwards was an American Puritan theologian, philosopher, and pastor and the leading intellectual of colonial New England. From his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts, he became a central figure in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, preaching the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in 1741. His philosophical and theological works, including Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will, and The Nature of True Virtue, developed an original idealist metaphysics, a compatibilist account of human freedom, and a definition of virtue as benevolence to being in general. He died shortly after assuming the presidency of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton.

Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 at East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son among the eleven children of a Congregationalist minister. He went up to the college founded at Saybrook (later Yale) at thirteen, took his bachelor's in 1720, and after two years of theological study and a brief New York pastorate became in 1726 junior, and from 1729 sole, pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, where he remained for twenty-three years.

His writings include the early Notes on the Mind and Notes on Natural Science; the revival narratives Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, and Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, documenting the local awakenings and the wider Great Awakening; the Religious Affections (1746); Freedom of the Will (1754); The Nature of True Virtue (posthumous 1765); and the Concerning the End for Which God Created the World. After his dismissal from Northampton in 1750 he served as missionary to the Mahican and Mohawk at Stockbridge, where most of these works were composed.

Edwards combined the Calvinism of his fathers with the new philosophical idealism of Locke and Newton into a rigorous metaphysics of being and consent in which God is the all-encompassing reality and creation is the ongoing communication of his glory. The most important American philosophical theologian of the eighteenth century, he died in Princeton in March 1758, soon after his inauguration as president of the College of New Jersey, of an inoculation against smallpox.