Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

Edwards, a minister for the Massachusetts Congregationalist Church, served in the vanguard of the Great Awakening during the 1730s, overseeing one the most significant revivals of the movement. He was born in the Connecticut town of East Windsor on October 5, 1703, the son of Timothy Edwards, himself a clergyman, and Esther Stoddard, the daughter of a minster. Young Jonathan exhibited an intellectual precociousness and boundless curiosity that carried him to Yale College in 1716 when he was still shy of his thirteenth birthday. He completed his degree with the school's highest honors four years later, having shown great aptitude in the study of natural science, philosophy, and theology but not yet fully committed to entering the ministry.

With the exception of a brief interlude in New York City, where he served as a minster for a small Presbyterian congregation, Edwards remained in New Haven for most of the seven years following his graduation from Yale, working as a tutor on behalf of the university and completing a divinity degree. Having wrestled with the concept of God throughout his formative years, Edwards sought to unlock the mystery of personal salvation and what constitutes the moral ideal during this period, a process that culminated in his solemnly dedicating his life to God in January 1723. Edwards sought to live a life that, in both thought and action, was fully consistent with scripture, but he continued to be plagued by doubts as to the legitimacy of his conversion for the rest of his life.

A twenty-three-year-old Edwards left New Haven in the late summer of 1726 to accept a position as a minister at the Congregationalist Church of Northampton, Massachusetts, a parish overseen by his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. Following his ordination in 1727, Edwards married Sarah Pierrepont, a minister's daughter from New Haven, and assumed sole duties of senior pastor when his grandfather died in 1729. The young minister quickly acquired a reputation as a compelling and persuasive messenger of God's word; in 1731 printers in

Boston began to print his sermons, the most famous being “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” His congregation rapidly expanded, necessitating an enlargement of the church to accommodate the new members. Fellow ministers in the area could not help but take notice and emulate Edwards's example.

Despite the impressive growth he oversaw at his church and his prominence as a leading figure in the Great Awakening, Edwards gradually lost favor with church elders. While they supported a policy that allowed unconverted individuals to take Communion and their children to be baptized, Edwards adamantly rejected this view and intended to address it from the pulpit. The elders' refusal to allow him to do so resulted in his forced resignation in 1750. Edwards spent the remaining eight years of his life as a missionary at the Housatonnuck community in Stockbridge and writing numerous religious treatises. Just before his death in 1758 following a smallpox inoculation, Edwards served briefly as the president of Princeton College.