Hello, I'm Wilson Pruitt, and you are listening to the History of Methodism Podcast. You can support us online at patreon.com/historyofmethodism. Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Today’s Episode: Jonathan Edwards.
After his sojourn to Germany, one of the seminal moments before the revival began was John Wesley’s encounter with The North American Calvinist Jonathan Edwards. Because of his importance to John’s concept of revival, this episode is dedicated to the early life of Edwards up to the publication of his Faithful Narrative, the text John read in October of 1738.
In order to do justice to the life of Jonathan Edwards, we must return to the reign of Queen Anne, who was sovereign at the birth of both Edwards and John Wesley.
During the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), a similar but not identical war broke out on the North American continent, now known as Queen Anne’s War, between the same belligerents but for different goals. Battles were fought all along what is now the United States and Canada, but the central theater for us was New England and Quebec, where French Soldiers with their indigenous allies fought British Soldiers and their indigenous allies. In large part, it was the indigenous nations that pushed the conflict more than their European Allies. Both French and British colonies were small in population and weak in manpower, but the indigenous nations were large in both and had decades old grievances against each other predating the arrival of Europeans.
Fear filled the New England Colonies. Fear of France. Fear of the indigenous nations. Fear of God. The fear of France and the indigenous peoples became true on February 29, 1704, as the British colony of Deerfield, Massachusetts, was attacked before dawn. 39 residents were killed. 112 were captured and taken to Montreal, including the Reverend John Williams, uncle of the recently born Jonathan Edwards. The insecurities of frontier life would shape the childhood of Edwards, as his biographer, George Marsden, points out.
Though born the same year with the same Queen reigning over Britain and with pastors as fathers, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards had very different childhoods and very different experiences.
Edwards was born on October 5, 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, the son of Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards. Another similarity between Edwards and Wesley was that Edwards’s grandfather in his mother’s side, Samuel Stoddard, was a famous Congregational Preacher of a similar theological bent to Samuel Annesley, Susannah’s father.
One major difference, though, was that the Edwards’s owned a slave housekeeper. They weren’t unique in this, but that doesn’t justify the situation.
Timothy was a strong preacher who focused on conversion, using language that Jonathan would later adopt and expand with even more theological depth. In the words of George Marsden.
Timothy Edwards, following Puritan precedents, emphasized three principal steps toward true conversion. First was ‘‘conviction’’ or ‘‘an awakening sense of a person’s sad estate with reference to eternity.’’ The term that the Reverend Edwards used for this first, but insufficient, step was ‘‘awakening.’’ We must notice that usage because ‘‘awakening’’ is the most common term used for periodic outbreaks of religious enthusiasm in New England congregations. An ‘‘awakening’’ was no guarantee of salvation. Jonathan described his ephemeral boyhood experience as one of ‘‘two more remarkable seasons of awakening.’…
To benefit from these awful warnings sinners had to reach the second step toward true conversion, which was humiliation. Normally, following the first enthusiasm of their awakening, they would experience a backsliding into sin that would lead them to realize the terribleness of their sins and that God would be entirely just in condemning them to hell. Sometimes this stage was described as involving a sense of ‘‘terror.’’…
Only then was one sufficiently prepared to reach the third step—if God graciously granted it—of receiving God’s regenerating ‘‘light,’’ or a ‘‘new spirit created in them,’’ so that they truly repented and sin would no longer reign in them, but rather they would be guided by the Holy Spirit ‘‘dwelling in them’’ and they would receive the gift of faith in Christ alone as their hope of salvation and would experience a ‘‘glorious change’’ to a life dedicated to serving God. Following stricter Puritan practice, Timothy Edwards required prospective communicant church members to give a public profession of their experience, which would follow this essential pattern.1
We will see evidence of this language of conversion in the Faithful Narrative.
At 13, Edwards began college at the Connecticut Collegiate School, which was small, poor, and split up between three branches. He attended the school in Wethersfield at first, and stayed with a half-cousin, Elisha Williams. A few years later, a large gift from the English merchant, Elihu Yale, helped to centralize the school in New Haven. After graduation, Edwards stayed on a year to complete an M.A.
Edwards struggled with his faith at Yale in the 1720s. He pushed against the Calvinist view of God’s sovereignty espoused by his parents, but also held to a view of original sin that showed him that he could not save himself. In the words of Marsden,
In the midst of this turmoil, he had a breakthrough. Suddenly he became convinced that indeed God was just in ‘‘eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure.’’ The tortuous obstacle was removed. Later he remembered clearly when he had reached this conviction, but ‘‘never could give an account, how, or by what means, I was thus convinced; not in the least imagining, in the time of it, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God’s Spirit in it: but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it.’’2
God’s delight in humanity was a lodestar for Edwards and helped him to reconcile the sovereignty so central to Calvinism with his own philosophical understanding. Whereas John Wesley thought the Calvinist God worse than the devil, Edwards saw in God a delightful and joy-filled Father whose reprimands were only given to correct us on the path to salvation.
In 1722, Edwards went to New York City as a supply minister to a small presbyterian church. Only 10,000 people lived in New York at the time, but it was still much larger than any place he had ever lived. Edwards kept a spiritual diary at this time where he tried to limit his distractions from God’s grace, another echo of a Wesleyan practice independently reached.
The following summer, against his will, Edwards moved back to East Windsor to be closer to his parents. His writings continued and his philosophical meditations expanded. Edwards read John Locke, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, as well as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London. He didn’t travel far in his life, but he read widely. Like many Reformed thinkers, he was influenced by Ramist logic, which was a rejection of Aristotelean hierarchies of knowledge.
At this point, Edwards describes in his journals observations and analysis of creatures around East Windsor, including spiders. Giving him fuel for the metaphorical fury that will be his most famous sermon, ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’
By the end of the year, Edwards became the pastor in Bolton, Connecticut, in a newly settled village close to East Windsor. Edwards was not excited about the position, and thankfully, it did not last long. For within the year, he was back at New Haven, this time as a tutor at Yale. In 1725, John Wesley taught at Oxford and Jonathan Edwards taught at Yale. This Academic post was also short-lived, because in 1726, Edwards’s grandfather, Samuel Stoddard, called Edwards to be his assistant minister at the church in Northhampton, Massachusetts.
In July of the following year, Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, and moved onto ten acres given by the city.
In 1729, Stoddard died and Edwards became pastor in an increasingly divided town. Stoddard was a politician as well as a preacher. He also preached open communion, which meant many who came to service were unconverted in Edwards’s eyes. The young people, as well, were lax in their morals. Threats of Roman Catholicisim from Canada, and Arminianism from Europe, abounded. This helps us to understands Edwards position as we near the revival of 1734-35, which he wrote about so eloquently, and which John Wesley read feverishly and saw as an inspirational text.
A Faithful Narrative is written as a letter, an account of the events in Northhampton of which Edwards was encouraged to write by Isaac Watts, the famous hymn writer, and John Guyse, another pastor in London. He begins with the some context to the county and the region. He then remarks about folks in Pascommuck, a few miles from the main town, who “seemed to be savingly wrought upon.” Edwards’s advice to the young people of the community was “that they should agree among themselves to spend the evenings after lectures in social religion, and to that end divide themselves into several companies to meet in various parts of the town; which was accordingly done.”3
The small groups which Edwards organized seem very comparable to the methodist meetings or Moravian band meetings or society meetings of which John Wesley was accustomed.
Then, ironically, Edwards remarks that
About this time began the great noise, in this part of the country, about Arminianism, which seemed to appear with a very threatening aspect upon the interest of religion here. The friends of vital piety trembled for fear of the issue; but it seemed, contrary to their fear, strongly to be overruled for the promoting of religion. Many who looked on themselves as in a Christless condition, seemed to be awakened by it, with fear that God was about to withdraw from the land, and that we should be given up to heterodoxy and corrupt principles; and that then their opportunity for obtaining salvation would be past. Many who were brought a little to doubt about the truth of the doctrines they had hitherto been taught, seemed to have a kind of trembling fear with their doubts, lest they should be led into bypaths, to their eternal undoing; and they seemed, with much concern and engagedness of mind, to inquire what was indeed the way in which they must come to be accepted with God. There were some things said publicly on that occasion, concerning justification by faith alone.4
“There was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.” 5 And “This work of God, as it was carried on, and the number of true saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town: so that in the spring and summer following, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then.”6
Edwards then goes into a description of the process of conversion that fits neatly with the preaching of his father, Timothy, we read above. Jonathan writes:
Persons are first awakened with a sense of their miserable condition by nature, the danger they are in of perishing eternally, and that it is of great importance to them that they speedily escape and get into a better state.7
When awakenings first begin, their consciences are commonly most exercised about their outward vicious course, or other acts of sin; but afterwards are much more burdened with a sense of heart-sins, the dreadful corruption of their nature, their enmity against God, the pride of their hearts, their unbelief, their rejection of Christ, the stubbornness and obstinacy of their wills; and the like.8
In those in whom awakenings seem to have a saving issue, commonly the first thing that appears after their legal troubles, is a conviction of the justice of God in their condemnation, appearing in a sense of their own exceeding sinfulness, and the vileness of all their performances.9
Finally,
The way that grace seems sometimes first to appear, after legal humiliation, is in earnest longings of soul after God and Christ: to know God, to love Him, to be humble before Him, to have communion with Christ in His benefits; which longings, as they express them, seem evidently to be of such a nature as can arise from nothing but a sense of the superlative excellency of divine things, with a spiritual taste and relish of them, and an esteem of them as their highest happiness and best portion.10
John Wesley read Edwards’s account less than two months after returning to England from Germany. He wrote in his published journal about his encounter: In walking I read the truly surprising narrative of the conversions lately wrought in and about the town of Northampton in New England. Surely, “this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes!”(WW 19:16). Wesley will later publish an abridgment of A Faithful Narrative in 1744 and he still spoke of it positively forty years later in his work on religion in North America.
Glen O’Brien writes that reading A Faithful Narrative
‘shook’ [Wesley] because it spoke of a revival being stirred by a form of pietism much like his own yet at a time of instability in his own personal journey, as he found himself even after Aldersgate, still ‘beating the air’ in trying to reconcile his theology of justification with his personal experience.11
Edwards was an important piece but it was not the only piece of the Methodist puzzle being put together at this time. What else was John doing? What else was he reading after he returned to England? And what happened to Charles in 1738? Next time on the History of Methodism.
Sources
Jonathan Edwards, A Jonathan Edwards Reader, Edited by John E. Smith et al. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003).
George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003).
Glen O’Brien, “'A Good And Sensible Man': John Wesley's Reading And Use Of Jonathan Edwards”
