Dismissal from Northampton of Jonathan Edwards

Meanwhile, Edwards’s relations with his own congregation had become strained; one reason for it was his changed views on the requirements for admission to the Lord’s Supper. In the Halfway Covenant, baptized but unconverted children of believers might have their own children baptized by “owning the covenant”; Stoddard had instituted the subsequently widespread practice of admitting to the Eucharist all who were thus “in the covenant,” even if they knew themselves to be unconverted. Edwards gradually came to believe that the profession required for admission to full communion should be understood to imply genuine faith, not merely doctrinal knowledge and good moral behaviour.

The public announcement of his position in 1749 precipitated a violent controversy that resulted in his dismissal. On July 1, 1750, Edwards preached his dignified and restrained “Farewell-Sermon.” In the course of this controversy he wrote two books, Qualifications for Communion (1749) and Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated, in a Reply to the Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams’s Book (1752), one to convince his congregation, the other to correct what he considered misrepresentations of his views by a kinsman, the pastor at Lebanon, Connecticut. Though Edwards himself was defeated, his position finally triumphed and provided New England Congregationalism with a doctrine of church membership more appropriate to its situation after disestablishment.

Pastorate at Stockbridge

In 1751 Edwards became pastor of the frontier church at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and missionary to the Native Americans there. Hampered by language difficulties, illness, wars, and conflicts with powerful personal enemies, he nevertheless discharged his pastoral duties and found time to write his famous work Freedom of Will (1754). The will, said Edwards, is not a separate, self-determining faculty with power to act contrary to the strongest motives, as he understood the Arminians to teach. Rather, it is identical with feelings or preference, and a volition is simply the soul’s “prevailing inclination” in action; the will “is as the greatest apparent good.” Humans are free to do as they please, and God therefore rightly holds them morally responsible for the quality of their volitions as expressions of their desires and intentions.

By 1757 Edwards had finished his Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), which was mainly a reply to the English divine John Taylor of Norwich, whose works attacking Calvinism (based on the thought of the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin) had “made a mighty noise in America.” Edwards defended the doctrine not only by citing biblical statements about the corruption of the human heart but also by arguing that the empirical evidence of the universal commission of sinful acts points to a sinful predisposition in every person. In answering Arminian objections to the notion that God “imputed” Adam’s guilt to his posterity, Edwards proposed a novel theory of identity by divine “constitution” to account for humanity’s unity with Adam and suggested that the innate corruption of humans is not a judicial punishment for Adam’s guilt but is really their own because of their participation (being one with him) in the sinful inclination that preceded Adam’s sinful act. Edwards’s was the first major contribution to the long debate about human nature in American theology and helped set the terms of that debate.

Edwards perceived the threat in Taylor’s notion of the innate goodness and autonomy of humanity; the whole Christian conception of supernatural redemption seemed to be at stake. He therefore planned further treatises, of which he completed two posthumously published dissertations: Concerning the End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue (1765). God’s glory, not human happiness, is his end in creation; but this is because God in his all-sufficient fullness must communicate himself by the exercise of his attributes. God can be said to aim at the creature’s happiness, but it is a happiness that consists in contemplating and rejoicing in God’s glory manifested in creation and redemption. Edwards defines true virtue as disinterested love (benevolence) toward God as Being in general and toward all lesser beings according to their degree of being. True virtue, therefore, does not spring from self-love or from any earthbound altruism (two prime 18th-century views); love to self, family, nation, or even humankind is good only if these lesser systems of being do not usurp the place of highest regard that belongs to God alone.

Edwards also projected books on other subjects, notably A History of the Work of Redemption (he had preached a series of sermons—posthumously published—on that subject in 1739), which was to be a complete theology combining biblical, historical, and systematic materials “in an entire new method.” Late in 1757, however, he accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and arrived there in January. He had hardly assumed his duties when he contracted smallpox and died.

Influence

Edwards’s immediate disciples, Joseph Bellamy (pastor at Bethlehem, Connecticut), Samuel Hopkins (pastor at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, later at Newport, Rhode Island,), and Jonathan Edwards, Jr., developed some of his “improvements” into a distinct theological school; it was first called “Hopkinsianism” and later the “New England Theology.” These men and their successors, in their effort to defend Calvinism against Arminians, Unitarians (those who denied the doctrine of the Trinity), and “infidels,” made important modifications in some of its doctrines and thus prepared the way for later 19th-century evangelical liberalism.

Edwards’s influence on the intellectual character of American Protestantism for a century after his death was very pronounced, and he was widely read in the British Isles. In a general revolt against Puritanism and Calvinism after the American Civil War (1861–65), Edwards’s prestige declined, and he was remembered mainly as a hellfire preacher or as an abstruse, absent-minded metaphysician. In the 1930s and after, he was rediscovered by theologians reacting against liberalism and by secular scholars seeking to delineate the “American mind.” Edwards’s ability to combine religious intensity with intellectual rigour and moral earnestness, the cosmic sweep of his theological vision, his emphasis on faith as an “existential” response to reality, his insistence that love is the heart of religion, and his uncompromising stand against all forms of idolatry are some of the reasons his life and writings are again being seriously studied.