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.