Jonathan Edwards

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Jonathan Edwards Overview

Critic Lois Gordon

Source Reference Guide to American Literature, rd ed., edited by Jim Kamp, St. James Press, 14

Criticism about Jonathan Edwards (170-1758)

Genre(s) Autobiographies; Religious works; Sermons; Essays

Jonathan Edwards is legendary in American history and letters not just as a Calvinist minister of fire and brimstone but, more importantly, as a revolutionary thinker who incorporated contemporary psychological and scientific ideas into his discourses on the human mind, natural science, and religion. A man who epitomized the mystical and practical (the evangelical and Puritan) tendencies of his time, Edwards was instrumental in the mid-18th-century revival of American Calvinism known as the Great Awakening. Edwards strove to destroy the increasingly popular Arminianist propositions which rejected the doctrines of predestination and the enslavement of the will. Arminianism asserted a doctrine of universal redemption based on the election, rather than the predetermination, of salvation. Edwards was unyielding in his strict adherence to the absolute primacy of deity and the utter subordination of man, to the Calvinist concept of the depravity of man and grace of the Gospel--to a belief system focusing on God as an inscrutable power that, while constituting humanity and nature, lacked complete identification with either. Throughout his life, despite the growing religious liberalism, Edwards repudiated all modern claims to mans natural rights and free will The unconverted are guilty and deserve the punishment awaiting them; this punishment is given by an infinite God in His justice; and the only hope of escape is by the gift of salvation which cannot be won by mans effort.

According to Perry Miller, Edwardss reading of John Lockes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was the major event in his intellectual life. From it, Edwards refined his idea that whatever the mind knows as idea depends upon sensation, rather than reason or speculation. As such, through a series of light images in A Divine and Supernatural Light, he discusses religious certainty in empirical terms one intuits or feels grace (the loveliness of Gods holiness) through supernatural illumination. One does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. Religious conversion is an overwhelming intuition.

Justification of Faith Alone (174) amplifies Edwardss thesis that the covenant between God and man is one of grace, not works; but faith actualizes grace. Again, consonant with the science of his day, Edwards incorporates Newtons causation theory, that effect exists, regardless of cause (atoms adhere not because of their inherent physical properties but because of an undefined Cause). To Edwards, as gravity adheres in matter, so God inheres in gravity and gives being and oneness to all. Man is therefore not justified just through faith. He has faith because he is first justified through Gods grace. Mans state is not prior but posterior to Gods grace.

Personal Narrative details his conversion twenty years earlier. Grace is a Divine and Supernatural Light that gives the regenerate a new apprehension and disposition to love divine decrees. He traces his regeneration out of the swamp into the meadow of experience, how he saw divine beauty in everything and experienced vehement longings of soul after God and Christ and after more holiness. The mention of a single word in the Bible caused his heart to burn with the ardency of soul and a flood of tears and weeping aloud. Edwards yearned to be nothing before God ... that God might be all. For the saved, there is a mystical-aesthetic intuition of divine beauty through supernatural illumination.

Despite growing resentment toward his frightening portraits of the unredeemed, Edwards delivered the famous sermon

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