As a theologian, Jonathan Edwards stood within the Reformed tradition that emerged from the Protestant Reformation in the Swiss and southern German cities of sixteenth-century Europe. Like other Reformed - or Calvinist - theologians, he accentuated the glory and sovereignty of a triune God, the original sin and depravity of humankind, and the gracious act by which God conferred eternal salvation on a determinate and predestined number of “elect ” souls. He shared the standard Reformed belief in salvation by grace through faith, the power of grace to transform the sinful heart, and the value of divine law as a guide for the gradual sanctification that marked the true Christian life. He concurred in the familiar Reformed view that saving truth came solely through the divine revelation in the Christian Bible. Yet Edwards also immersed himself in the philosophy, ethical theory, and natural science of his own era; and his theology manifested a blending of traditional, biblical, and philosophical themes that inaugurated a discrete Edwardsean theological tradition in America. For his admirers, Edwards was the genius who proved that Reformed theology could overcome - and even appropriate for its own purposes - the challenge of the Enlightenment. For his critics, he became the source of errors that threatened the integrity of Calvinist orthodoxy.

Edwards drew on a tradition that defined theology as an eminently practical and not merely theoretical discipline. Since the twelfth century, theologians had argued that theology was a theoretical enterprise insofar as its aim was the beholding of God as an end in itself, an intrinsic good.