Jonathan Edwards

Before he wrote about damnation he wrote about spiders. At about 11 he watched young spiders sail across a Connecticut field and set the mechanism down in an essay he later polished to match the scientific prose of his day. He was the fifth of 11 children and the only son of a minister who tutored boys for college on the side, and his father and elder sisters prepared him so well that Yale took him before his 13th birthday. Newton and Locke reached him there and never let go. He kept notebooks headed The Mind, Natural Science, The Scriptures and Miscellanies, drew up resolutions against wasting time and against eating or drinking freely, and settled on a rule of 13 hours of study a day.

He inherited one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony from his grandfather in 1729, and four years later something broke open inside it. In six months of 1734 and 1735, nearly 300 of Northampton's 1,100 young people joined the church. Edwards took down the conversions with the precision of a naturalist and published them as A Faithful Narrative in 1737, which made the revival legible in England and Scotland and handed the movement a method. At Enfield in 1741 he preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, delivered not by shouting but in a quiet voice that walked the congregation toward a conclusion it could not escape. The systematic theology came later, in exile — Freedom of the Will, written in four and a half months, and Original Sin, finished the year he died.

In June 1731, at an auction in Newport, Edwards bought a girl of about 14 named Venus for 80 pounds. He acquired at least five more people over the following two decades — Joab and Rose Binney, their son Titus, and a married couple called Joseph and Sue — and in 1751 he performed Joab and Rose's wedding himself. A 1741 pamphlet has him defending the ownership of debtors, war captives and people born enslaved in North America while condemning the Atlantic trade as cruel and inhumane. His own congregation broke with him over something else. When he began requiring a credible profession of faith before admission to communion, an ecclesiastical council voted 10 to 9 to dissolve the pastorate, the members ratified it by more than 200 to 23, and a town meeting barred him from the Northampton pulpit.

He took the presidency of the College of New Jersey in February 1758, submitted to a smallpox inoculation to encourage others, and died of it five weeks later. His students carried the theology into New England pulpits as the New Divinity. His descendants became a genre of their own — Aaron Burr was his grandson, and Progressive-era eugenicists totted up the family's clergymen and college presidents as proof of heredity. Perry Miller pulled him back into the American canon around the Second World War, and Yale spent three decades on the critical edition. Since the 2010s the slaveholding has been the argument, with responses ranging from flat condemnation to the claim that he was a man of his time.

Jonathan Edwards's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Divine and Supernatural Light speech
  The sermon he thought held the moving principle of the revival 1734
• A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God book
  Conversion recorded like field data, and read across Britain 1737
• Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God speech
  Preached at Enfield, Connecticut, in a quiet voice 1741
• Religious Affections book
  His test for distinguishing genuine conversion from feeling 1746
• Freedom of the Will book
  Written at Stockbridge in four and a half months 1754
• Original Sin book
  Finished in the year he died 1758

• c. 1714 aged ~11 Writes an essay on the ballooning flight of spiders He was about 11. He revised it later to match the scientific writing of the period.
• 1716 aged ~13 Enters Yale College before his 13th birthday Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding reached him the following year.
• February 15, 1727 aged 23 Ordained at Northampton as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard He married Sarah Pierpont, then 17, the same year.
• June 1731 aged 27 Buys a girl of about 14 named Venus at a Newport auction for 80 pounds He acquired at least five more enslaved people over the next 20 years.
• 1735 aged ~32 Nearly 300 of Northampton's 1,100 young people join the church in six months The revival cooled that summer after at least two suicides, one of them his own uncle.
• 1741 aged ~38 Preaches Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield
• 1750 aged ~47 His church votes him out over who may take communion The council split 10 to 9. The membership ratified by more than 200 to 23.
• 1751 aged ~48 Becomes pastor at Stockbridge and missionary to the Housatonic He wrote his major philosophical works there and attacked officials profiteering off the mission.
• March 22, 1758 aged 54 Dies of the inoculation he took to set an example He had been installed as president of the College of New Jersey on February 16.

• Aaron Burr 1756–1836
  Third vice president who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later tried for treason. grandfather of
• Billy Graham 1918–2018
  Evangelist whose mass crusades, media reach, and presidential relationships made him a defining figure in modern American Protestantism. ancestor of the American revival
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. mapped the same conversions later
• Roger Williams 1603–1683
  Founder of Rhode Island and early advocate of religious liberty and separation of church and state. the other New England argument
• Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811–1896
  Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin whose novel galvanized the abolitionist movement. raised inside his theology