Birth of Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards was born 307 years ago today, October 5, 1703.

Evangelism is as American as baseball and jazz; for every Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, and Dizzy Gillespie, there is Billy Sunday, Joel Osteen, and Billy Graham. Tent revivals in the summertime are almost as ubiquitous as softball games and carnival midways.

This, of course, only makes sense, as America was founded by individuals who had fled their ancestral homes in Europe that they might worship freely without the fear of persecution. This week marks the birthday of one of America’s earliest and most passionate evangelists, Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut. His large family was familiar with the evangelical mission; both his father and his grandfather were preachers. Edwards entered Yale when he was twelve. He was actively involved in the theological discourse of his day and assumed leadership of an established congregation—his grandfather’s—by his mid-twenties. For Edwards, heaven and hell were quite real, and the possibilities of eternity had no middle ground attached to them:

So that thus it is, that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold ‘em up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them.
(Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 1741)

For Edwards and his followers, the hell featured in the works of Dante and Milton was not an imagined thing so much as it was a horrible and hot, tactile prospect for those who were not among the Elect. Edwards preached was the original “fire and brimstone” of the American religious experience.

A doctrinal dispute between Edwards and his congregation caused a separation, and Edwards departed to minister to Native Americans in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he also continued to write and preach. His 1754 work Freedom of the Will is an attack on Arminianism, an anti-Calvinist movement begun in the early seventeenth century; in 1758 he penned The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, a series of arguments on the depravity of man. Edwards was asked to serve as president of the College of New Jersey and did so briefly until his death in March 1758. He is considered one of the earliest great American minds.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery