In 1858, a hundred years after Jonathan Edwards died, “The Deacon's Masterpiece: or The Wonderful 'One-Hoss-Shay.' A Logical Story ” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

Other than that perfect bit of timing, both the date of construction of the chaise - ”Seventeen hundred and fifty-five ” - and the measure of its history hint at Edwards and Freedom of the Will, first published in 1754. More directly, if less rhythmically, Oliver Wendell Holmes later castigates Edwards in more than two dozen pages of the International Review, declaring his theology a “barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic ” system. And, returning to a fictive account at about the same time, Holmes identifies the “real aim ” of his novel Elsie Venner, A Romance of Destiny, as a “test ” of original sin and “human responsibility for the disordered volition. ” That the poem found its way onto the pages of The Atlantic during its first year may be little more than public notice for one of its founders, much like the lines of Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell, its first editor. Yet its publication proved significant for Edwards, not so much in its form as its forum, “a magazine, ” as the cover leaf of The Atlantic had it, “of literature, art, and politics. ”

Rarely do accounts of early modern European philosophy mention Jonathan Edwards. His philosophical reflections are typically dismissed as inconsequential because, in the view of many historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, he does not play a significant role in the discussion of issues raised by his contemporaries. His arguments seem to be so dominated by concerns with Calvinist doctrinal disputes that he is usually understood as an outsider commenting on discussions thematized by Descartes, Locke, and others. Even when he is juxtaposed with thinkers such as Samuel Clarke, Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury), or Francis Hutcheson, he is portrayed as espousing views that are hopelessly immersed in Puritan theology.

Such a marginalizing treatment of Edwards is unfortunate, especially considering how he develops an alternative approach to the way that much of modern philosophy is practiced. He is not alone in pursuing that alternative, for he shares with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, Nicolas Malebranche, G. W. Leibniz, George Berkeley, and other “theocentric metaphysicians ” the view that questions about existence, knowledge, moral judgments, and beauty can be resolved only by understanding things in terms of their place in the universe and their relation to God. For such thinkers, Cartesian minds and simple natures, Hobbesian bodies, and Lockean simple ideas simply cannot be the starting points for a legitimate philosophy, because such insular entities are unintelligible apart from the network of relations that identifies them in the first place.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) is, indisputably, a significant figure in American history. He emerged on the religious landscape of New England in the opening half of the eighteenth century, but soon achieved an international reputation. Edwards's description of religious revivals and his defense of evangelical Protestantism vaulted him into the public arena at home and abroad. Though his life was cut short prematurely a few months after becoming the president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), his publications and his personal influence on a subsequent generation of religious leaders assured that his theological legacy would continue after his death.

The impact of Edwards's ideas expanded with the passage of time. In the eighteenth century, disciples and members of his extended family, including Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and Timothy Dwight, were instrumental in the articulation of an Edwardsean theology. The nineteenth century saw the consolidation and expansion of that tradition within evangelical Protestantism. The image of Edwards as a powerful preacher and a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christianity also attracted literary and cultural reflection by authors as diverse as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Those same years witnessed the publication of collected editions of Edwards's Works as well as the frequent republication of his individual titles, including, most notably, The Life of David Brainerd.

The religious culture of early eighteenth-century New England was recognizably “Puritan ” in important respects despite changes in social and political life that resulted in toleration of the once-despised Baptists, Anglicans, and Quakers and a sharp curtailing of the ministers' influence in political affairs. Both were consequences of the colonists' “adjustment to empire. ” Yet the signs of continuity were many. The Platform of Discipline of 1648, familiarly known in New England as the Cambridge Platform, remained a persuasive description of the “Congregational Way ” that had been inaugurated in the 1630s. In their everyday preaching, the clergy reiterated the distinction, so important to the generation of John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Thomas Shepard, between “vital ” or “experimental ” religion and religion that was merely external, or a matter of “formality. ” Simultaneously, the ministers were voicing another Puritan commonplace: the obligation of everyone in a Christian society to practice certain moral duties. No less conventional were complaints that young people were flouting these duties and that civil magistrates were inconsistent in punishing the disorderly. Even so, New England seemed to some contemporaries a society in which social life was penetrated by the work of “reformation ” that had meant so much to the Puritan movement. Meanwhile, congregations and ministers were deeply involved with the rituals of fasts and thanksgivings that evoked long-persisting assumptions about a covenanted people's obligations to observe God's will.

In 1735 Bernard Bartlett, a member of the church of Northampton, Massachusetts, said that his pastor, Jonathan Edwards, “was as Great an Instrument as the Devil Had on this Side [of] Hell to bring Souls to Hell.” Seven years later, the Reverend David Hall of Sutton, Massachusetts, after a visit from Edwards, wrote in his diary, “I thought I had not saw in any man for some years so much of the grace of God causing y e face to shine.” These two very different estimations from people who were acquainted with Edwards attest to the challenge of understanding Edwards on a personal level. As a man in authority and a widely published author, he was subject to vastly different reactions. How can we, at three centuries' remove, hope to plumb the private occupations of this complicated individual?

Although the autobiographical documents Edwards left are rich and revealing, they are regrettably few in number. But in the face of this dearth, those who want to understand Edwards's sense of self, personal and religious, can define “personal” differently. Strictly speaking, “personal” encompasses documents Edwards composed for himself only, such as the “Resolutions ” and “Diary,” to track and regulate his religious life. More broadly, we can define “personal ” to include documents in which Edwards revealed his sense of self but that were written for other purposes or were addressed to others. This would include “On Sarah Pierpont” and the Personal Narrative, along with selected letters (or parts of them), especially those to family members and trusted confidants. Still other documents, such as his “Account Book” and “Last Will and Testament,” more social in nature, shed light on Edwards's lifestyle and social network, both of which are key indicators of private selves and public identities. Conceived in this way, our search for the personal Edwards is not so limited as it may seem at first glance.

If we are to appreciate Jonathan Edwards as a real person and not just as an intellectual or spiritual prodigy who appears out of nowhere in the American wilderness, we must try to get a sense of his contexts. Edwards lived in a time and place very different from our own, and so it takes some acts of imagination to get a good sense of him in his own times.

First, we must think of when Edwards lived. Born in 1703 and living until 1758, he came of age almost a full century after the first American Puritan settlements; but he died before there was an inkling of the American Revolution. Even most educated Americans today would be hard pressed to name anything that happened in colonial America between 1703 and 1758, except perhaps the awakening with which Edwards himself was associated and the outbreak of the French and Indian War during Edwards's last years. They might also recall that Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, was a contemporary of Edwards and thus provides us with some secular glimpses of these largely unknown decades.

Our picture of Edwards's world is helped considerably if we think about Europe during his time. One of the most momentous developments was the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment, which was growing throughout Edwards's lifetime. Edwards's early thought was shaped by the great English figures of the previous generation, Isaac Newton and John Locke, and he was a contemporary of the Scottish David Hume, whose work he knew well. Edwards's intellectual context was shaped by a host of British and European thinkers who were shepherding Christendom from an age of intense faiths and religious wars into what they hoped would be an age of reason, science, and common sense. Benjamin Franklin's secular outlook is a testimony to the appeal that these impressively formulated British and European Enlightenment views often had for young colonials.

Jonathan Edwards was not just an American. Though living in “the American plantations, ” the theologian was conscious of being an inhabitant of “the British dominions. ” He was a Briton who delighted in the discomfiture of the French and longed for news of “the notions that prevail in our nation. ” Yet he was also a Christian whose sympathies extended beyond British territories “into Holland, Zeeland, and other Protestant countries, and all the visible church of Christ. Edwards had a cosmopolitan dimension, fostered by his grand apocalyptic vision of the future spread of the gospel. So it is not surprising that others saw in him more than an American. For Isaac Taylor, a commentator on his works writing in 1831, there was no doubt that Edwards shared his own English identity. “We claim Edwards as an Englishman, ” asserted Taylor: “he was such in every respect but the accident of birth in a distant province of the empire. ” But Samuel Hopkins, Edwards's first biographer, recognized the complementary truth that Edwards won fame not only in America and Britain but also in the Netherlands and Germany.5 Although Edwards appealed particularly to his compatriots in England, Scotland, and Wales, he enjoyed a European reputation even during his lifetime and eventually gained a measure of celebrity in specific circles elsewhere. Jonathan Edwards was a figure who contributed to intellectual life far beyond New England.

In a profound sense, revivals were in Jonathan Edwards's genes. Were there to be a spiritual genome, “revival ” and “Jonathan Edwards ” would make a perfect match. From his father, Timothy Edwards, he would acquire the tools and ambition to be America's greatest preacher and theologian. And from his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, he would inherit a revivalist role model without peer. When Edwards succeeded Stoddard in the wealthy and powerful Northampton, Massachusetts, pulpit, he succeeded an evangelistic legend. Under Stoddard's impassioned and terrifying preaching, Northampton residents went through five “harvests ” of mass conversions marked by sudden jumps in church membership. The challenge for young Edwards was to replicate his grandfather's achievement.

Like his grandfather, Edwards would strategize for revival, and always at the center of that strategizing would be the young people. In April 1734, the death of a young person in the congregation set off a general concern among the youth, and in the months that followed, Edwards saw “soul concerns ” spread through the town. Soon revivals spread from the youth to the adults. In all, Edwards noted, over three hundred people were savingly converted; well over two hundred were admitted into church membership in the two-year period - at one point as many as one hundred in one day. Equally pleasing to Edwards was the atmosphere of harmony and Christian behavior that prevailed in notoriously contentious Northampton. Even more encouraging were reports from nearly thirty communities up and down the Connecticut River Valley attesting to the revival spirit in their churches.

In March 1753 Jonathan Edwards wrote a letter to his twenty-one-year-old daughter Esther, who had been living away from home since her marriage the previous year to Aaron Burr, the president of the College of New Jersey and the pastor of a congregation in Newark. This letter was a reply to one Esther had written her mother, informing her that she was still suffering from “extreme weakness and distressing pains ” and asking for her comfort and advice. “Mothers, ” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich observes, “represented the affectionate mode in [the] essentially authoritarian mode of childrearing ” practiced in colonial New England. Although Esther had received the “unwearied kindness and tender care of ” her husband during her illness, she was also homesick and in need of a little mother-love. But her precarious physical and spiritual state demanded the stronger hand of a father. Edwards begins his letter in an affectionate fatherly tone, assuring his daughter that he and Sarah “are glad to hear that you are in any respect better, ” and expressing their concern “at your remaining great weakness. ” He quickly shifts, however, from his paternal to his pastoral voice, to address his daughter's spiritual condition, a topic more urgent than her physical health.

This new voice sounds distant, even cold and aloof. Taking Esther's illness as an occasion for her spiritual growth, Edwards severs the intimate parental bond that should tie a father to his sick child and positions his daughter at the same remove any seriously ill member of his congregation would occupy. He does not comfort her with the reassuring message that suffering and sickness are rare interruptions in a normally happy life. “I would not have you think, ” he cautions, “that any strange thing has happened to you in this affliction. ”

In 1740, looking back on earlier years, Jonathan Edwards penned the following statement concerning the central place of the Bible in his personal and professional life. “I had then, and at other times, ” he wrote, “the greatest delight in the holy Scriptures, of any book whatsoever. ” His was an apt summary that, in fact, applied to his entire life. In his statement he also sounded a note of unambiguous spiritual pleasure that he derived from the study of the biblical text. “Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt an harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. ” Edwards recollected that the force and power of “every sentence ” was such that often he “could not get along in reading. ” He found himself dwelling “long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it. ” In his judgment, “almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders. ”

By the time that he wrote those reflections, Edwards had awell-developed program of private study of the Bible evident in the notebooks and commentaries that he was compiling. Early in his ministerial career, while serving as a supply minister in New York City, he had “Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same. ”2 Although from time to time he acknowledged difficulty maintaining that high resolve, he never abandoned the goal of steady, constant, and frequent study of the Bible. The evidence of that lifelong commitment is the massive body of exegetical reflections from his hand.

From the second half of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century, Western Christianity underwent a profound intellectual transformation; it went through a prolonged series of critical self-reexaminations of its basic intellectual foundations in many spheres - religion and science, society and politics, morals and manners, gender and race, economy and markets, education and childhood, crime and punishment. This reassessment marked the disenchantment of the world and the beginning of the modern age as we know it today. “Our age is, in special degree, the age of criticism, ” wrote Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in Critique of Pure Reason (1781), “and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination. ” The intellectual movement associated with this important ideological and cultural transformation in the history of Western civilization is commonly called the age of Enlightenment.

Instead of accepting traditional religious worldviews at face value or uncritically adopting the values of established authority, Enlightenment thinkers elevated the role of the mind and emphasized the power of reason, thus leading to the abolition of customarily accepted moral and religious absolutes. “In much the same way that the world became the object of scientific inquiry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through a process of desacralisation, so too, religious practices ” were “demystified by the imposition of natural laws. ”

Ever since the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards's legacy and the fate of evangelicals in America have been symbiotically linked. As Edwards's reputation has fared, so has the evangelical movement. There are many reasons for this, not all of them anchored in his eminence. Yet more than any other thinker, Edwards has aided evangelicals in gaining credibility and in furthering their agenda in American public life. Not surprisingly, then, evangelicals have usually championed Edwards more wholeheartedly - less hesitantly, and often much less critically - than has any other group. Not all of them have favored Edwards's Calvinistic commitments. Since the time of the Civil War, most have dissented from Calvinism. But all have shared in Edwards's passionate pursuit of “true religion, ” the kind of vital Christian piety that stems from regeneration (spiritual rebirth) and sets its subjects apart from nominal Christianity.

As Edwards preached in 1740, “[t]here is such a thing as conversion, ” and “ 'tis the most important thing in the world; and they are happy that have been the subjects of it and they most miserable that have not. ” This doctrine has since become a hallmark of the evangelical movement, distinguishing it from other forms of traditional Protestantism. Indeed, for the purposes of this chapter, evangelicalism will be defined as orthodox Protestantism transformed and reconfigured by the transatlantic awakenings of the early eighteenth century. “

Jonathan Edwards published his many sermons and books a century before anyone devoted a substantial work to the topic of “American literature ” and even longer before the subject existed as an academic discipline. Indeed, in his day no one even conceived the category “American literature. ” Like Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, and other representatives of what subsequently was termed, first, “colonial American literature ” and then “early American literature, ” Edwards was an Englishman in British North America, a provincial who labored on the periphery of empire. When such a colonist wrote, it was as an Englishman, to be read across the Atlantic as well as by fellow colonists. Edwards explicitly acknowledged this dual audience, reminding himself in one of his early notebooks, “Before I venture to publish in London, to make some experiment in my own country, ” and thus “to play at small games first, that I may gain some experience in writing. ” Beginning in the 1730s he began to realize this plan, publishing his first sermon in Boston and a few years later having the first edition of his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton issued in London under the sponsorship of the prominent Nonconformist clergymen Isaac Watts and John Guyse. By the time of his death in 1758 Edwards had, indeed, become a participant in Europe's larger intellectual conversation, an English thinker of the first rank.