Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
3.3 JONATHAN EDWARDS
(1703–1758)
Jonathan Edwards was born in
East Windsor, Connecticut to Reverend
Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard
Edwards, daughter of the Reverend
Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729), an
important religious gure in western
Massachusetts. Nurtured by Calvinistic
authorities in the Puritan Faith,
Edwards nevertheless relied on his own
understanding and observation of the
world around him. Before reaching his
teens, he refuted materialism in an essay
and wrote a study of the ying spider.
Upon entering Yale at the age of thirteen,
he came to terms (on his own terms)
Image 3.1 | Jonathan Edwards
with Puritan doctrine, particularly the Artist | Unknown
Source | Wikimedia Commons
idea of the elect and of God’s complete
License | Public Domain
sovereignty. As strict Calvinists, the
Puritans held that God to be all-powerful and completely sovereign and all humans
to be naturally depraved. God elected only a few for salvation.
Edwards’ fervent acceptance of Puritan doctrine was heightened by his study
of John Locke’s (1632–1704) Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
This philosophical treatise encouraged empiricism, experience, and sensation. It
tied abstract ideas to concrete particulars. To paraphrase the later Romantic poet
John Keats (1795–1821), Edwards came to feel his abstract faith in his pulses. He
recorded his conversion in his Personal Narrative (1765). After graduating from
Yale, Edwards was ordained as minister at Northampton, Massachusetts, assisting
his grandfather Solomon Stoddard before succeeding him upon his death. In 1727,
Edwards married Sarah Pierrepont; together, they raised ten children.
As minister, Edwards sought to bring his congregation to an understanding of
the Puritan faith that involved a physical (as well as metaphysical) experience of
faith. His preaching was so successful that it contributed to the wave of revivalism
now known as the rst Great Awakening that swept through the colonies in the
1730s and 1740s. Listeners to Edwards’ sermons were gripped by a full-bodied
conviction of God’s mercy for the elect, a conviction characterized by strong
emotions and sentiment.
The Great Awakening led to schisms within churches with some members
opposing revivals as sources of hysteria and disorder, particularly as they
empowered uneducated itinerant ministers, inspired individual authority in many
women, and converted a number of blacks to Christianity. The early sovereignty of
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