Edwardseanism and the Second Awakening

Jonathan Edwards did not live long to put his theology into full play, but his two disciples, Samuel Hopkins from West Springfield, Massachusetts; and Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut; they did. What both men generated first was not revival but controversy.

In 1766, Hokpins’ An Inquiry Concerning the Promises of the Gospel indicted the New England Churches for having watered down the depravity of original sin, and then turn conversion into a gentile embrace of polite morals, and thus ending up making God into an indulgent uncle rather than a righteous father. Given the profound moral warpage of human depravity, one might as easily expect a hand-less climber to scale a mountain as to expect a sinner to use the means of grace. Given God’s hostility to human sin, its ill effects could only be overcome when gives a new heart in regeneration. Only then, is a foundation laid in the mind for the discerning of the truth of the Gospel in its real beauty and excellency.

This meant that there could be no gradual wrapping up to a new heart. Instead, this change was worked by the spirit of God immediately and instantaneously. Nobody should fool himself into believing that there were promises of regenerating grace made to the exercises and doings of the unregenerate. There was only one option. Hopkins said that men are required to repent and turn to God on pain of eternal damnation, and are declared to be in a state of condemnation until they do so.

Established Congregational order in New England was defied by the prospect of the new divinity, which discounted all the efforts made under the use of means, and demanded the full use of their natural ability and immediately repent. They liked it still less when Hopkins and Bellamy began excommunicating those who didn’t repent at once. And when Hopkins began teaching that not only were people obliged to use all their natural ability to repent, but were also obligated to exercise, after repentance, a Christian and self-denying life.

Through Edwards’ juxtaposition of natural ability and moral necessity, Hopkins and Bellamy could preach the most extreme Calvinistic versions of absolute divine sovereignty.

They enraged some people by this. Hopkins, in fact, was forced out of his church in 1769, and moved to New Port, Rhode Island, where he enraged still more people by denouncing the slave trade as the ultimate sin against disinterested or impartial benevolence. Bellamy stayed as pastor of Bethlehem for 50 years. In the words of one of his followers, his preaching “made God so great”. Indeed it did.

The Second Awakening

Restless and idealistic theological students, fresh from the tepid atmosphere of Yale and Harvard, flocked to Hopkins and Bellamy for ministerial apprenticeships. It was these next generation Edwarseans who really lit the bonfires of revival across New England, in what became generally known as the Second Great Awakening. By the 1790’s, Hopkins estimated that he and Bellamy had planted over 100 of their pupils and sympathizers in pulpits across Western Massachusetts and Western Connecticut. The revivals were sweeping more than 100 towns in New England, most of them under the preaching of this new divinity.

These preachers prided themselves with the passion with which they wrote and studied. Nathaniel Taylor devoted himself for 78 years, from ten to sixteen hours a day, in his study. Hopkins met with two of his students to talk theology through the day. They eventually noted a glow from a fire in the East. It was actually the sun coming up the next day.

Bellamy was even more determined to train new divinity missionaries for the New England churches. Upwards of 60 theological students passes through the barn he refurnished in Bethlehem as a one-man seminary. They became the most vivid and demanding voices for a consistent Calvinism, as they called it, in the post-Awakening and post-Revolutionary decades. They, in turn, trained ministerial students of their own.

The Father of Modern Revivalism

None of the new divinity ministers, however, cleared a wide path for himself in American culture as Charles Grandison Finney. Born in Western Connecticut, Finney moved to upstate New York, and originally trained as a lawyer. In 1821, Finney was dramatically converted, and embarked on a new career as a preacher of revivals. No one ever wielded the thunderbolts of the sinners’ moral ability, that need for immediate repentance and the requirement for a perfect disinterested benevolence, than Charles Finney.

He served as pastor of the Chatham Street Chapel and the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. Eventually, he became one of the leading lights in founding Oberlin College. He denounced selfishness as the sin of sins, and the diametric opposite of disinterested benevolence. Under the heading of selfishness, Finney included everything from slave owning to overdressing.

Revivals of religion are not permanent states of affairs. With Finney, the violence of the new divinity reached its apex, and then diminished its intensity. His preaching dwelt so much on the sinners’ natural ability to repent, that people forgot (and accused him of forgetting), that he was, after all, a Calvinist. Disinterested benevolence, which shaped both the origins of the anti-slavery movement and the organization of missionary work, finally degenerated into a cheerless code of does and don'ts.

When Finney tried to illustrate just how much natural ability sinners had by installing an anxious bent near his pulpit, and inviting anxious sinners to come, sit there and be prayed with; even his fellow revival laborers began to dismiss him as a sensation-seeking embarrassment. Yet, these intellectual airs of Jonathan Edwards turned the Second Great Awakening into a great cultural force. In a secular republic, the revivalists wrenched control of the will of the republic, or at least of the republic’s culture, out of the hand of the deists, out of the hands of the secularists, and turned the ship that Jefferson and Madison had imagined would sail before secular winds, and set it to sail before God’s winds.

They showed by this that American religion did not need an official tax-supported, government-recognized base in American politics in order to have a decisive influence on American life. In almost the same way that Edwards had taught, that God rules human conduct not by force but by the presentation of motives, so the Edwarseans transformed all the protestant churches of America into presenters of motives to American culture, rather than tax collectors who were backed up and reinforced by civil statutes.

Unable to legislate, they organized independent societies for Bible distribution, for alcoholism reform, for observance of the Sabbath, for suppressing vice and immorality, and for the end of slavery. Specially for the end of slavery.

Edwardseans and the Anti-slavery Movement

Slavery described precisely the sort of natural inability and natural necessity which Edwards insisted was not the true notion of Calvinism. To the extent that slavery literally involved the repression of Christianity among the slaves by their masters, it was bound to arouse the animus of the new divinity. Oddly enough, Edwards himself had been a slave owner, although not on the dimensions of Thomas Jefferson. His slave ownership was limited to the purchase of an occasional domestic helper for the Edwards’ household in 1731 and 1736. But, as early as 1741, Edwards was already criticizing the New England slave trade. During Edwards’ pastorate in Northampton, six African slaves were admitted to full membership on an equal par with any other citizen of Northampton.

It was Hopkins who characteristically applied the full logic of Edwards to slavery. In 1771, he began his preaching against slave trade as a violation of the principle of disinterested benevolence. Two years after that, Hopkins began directly attacking not just slave trade, but slavery itself. He was joined in his protest by Edwards the younger, in New Haven. Radical opposition to slavery eventually became an independent issue on its own for the new divinity.

In 1859, the most radical blow yet struck against American slavery, would come from a man nurtured under a new divinity pastorate, John Brown. The power generated by the revivals, awakenings and the new divinity theology gave the now disestablished churches of New England everything they needed to accomplish the reforms that Jefferson’s wall of separation prevented them from imposing directly as organized churches.

When the French liberal Alexis de Toqueville took his celebrated tour of the United States in the 1830’s, he was amazed to find that in the United States religion had no influence on the laws or on political opinions, nevertheless it worked to regulate the State. If Edwarsean style of revivalism was an important means for firing up interest in religions and reform, the truth was that it was a less than happy instrument, less than successful instrument for sustaining that interest.

The demand for immediate repentance and for disinterested benevolence was supposed to infuse new virtue back into public life through renewed individuals. Well, unhappily, it might just as easily convince renewed individuals to have nothing further to do with public life, to disengage entirely from the sinfulness of their surrounding neighbors. So, Edwarsean revivalism was, at the end of the day, still a reflection of the old Puritan weakness for syncretism.

The revivals called people to repentance, but they also called them out of society, out of their normal relations, out of their everyday moral lives, to participate in an intensely demanding, but still very other-worldly version of protestant Christianity. The very fact that a revival was judged necessary at all was a judgement on the failures of the regular churches and on the impurities of conventional society. Its logical end was to turn people into come-outers of various sorts, and to inflate a radical individualism.

A new answer to the problem of religion’s role in leading American life will come from the 19th century academic moral philosophers, and from John Witherspoon’s Scottish philosophy of common sense.

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Jonathan Edwards on Free Will

A wall of separation between Church and State was not what the righteous Presbyterians and Congregationalists of America had gone into the Revolution for. It became a very good question what they would propose to do about it. The first answer came from the disciples of Jonathan Edwards.

Curiously, the intellectual fuel for these answers laid buried in the pages of Edwards’ great treatise on free will. It arose out of an important distinction Edwards wanted to make so that he could demonstrate that all human actions were divinely ordered by God (Calvinism), and yet hold people morally accountable for those actions. When God decreed a certain act, that act became necessary, it had to happen. But acts can become necessary in one of two very different ways.

God could actually arm wrestle someone into doing what he wants. All the while, the person is kicking and screaming in protest because he really wanted something else. That’s one way an act can become necessary. This is mostly the caricature of what people think about Edwards, Calvinism and unconditional election. On the other hand, though, an act can become necessary if you already have a certain psychological inclination toward that act. If you like chocolate, I can pretty well bet money that if I point out just the right chocolate or just the right amount of it, you’ll choose it. There is a certain measure of predictability in human behavior, we don’t live, act or behave randomly. The more intense a person’s inclination toward a certain behavior, the more likely it is that it will be acted upon.

Edwards called the necessity that involves force, the arm twisting version of necessity, natural necessity. He cheerfully admitted that anyone who is compelled to act under the force of natural necessity cannot be held morally accountable for what they do. If you force me at gun point to drive you to or from the scene of crime, I can’t be held as your accomplice, you violated my free will.

The other kind of necessity, which arises from our own inclinations and desires, Edwards called moral necessity. Because nobody is actually forcing us to do things by moral necessity, we can be held liable. In fact, the greater the force of an evil inclination in our actions, the more accountable we are, precisely because we have all the physical power we needed to do otherwise.

With that, Edwards hit everyone’s panic button. As sinners in the hands of an angry God, we possess a nature that inclines us to sin. In fact, it inclines us to sin all the time. We labor day by day under the force of moral necessity. That gives us a moral inability to do anything other that sin. None of this happens because God forces us to sin. That would be a natural necessity, and then we would have an excuse, we could say that we were made to do it that way, you can’t blame us.

The fact is, said Edwards, we actually possess all the natural ability we could ever want not to sin. Translated into practical terms, what this meant was that no one could shelter themselves from the call to repentance and conversion, as they had for generations in New England, behind such pious beliefs as the Half-Way Covenant, or the plead that they were gradually working their way through their depravity (almost like therapy), by using the means of grace, such as prayer or reading the Bible. You were, Edwards taught, deprived totally and there is nothing you could do about it, but you have arms, legs, lips and brains, and you could use them all to bow down in the dust and repent, and you could do it now without waiting for grace to get you around doing it.

So, you were liable. Even if you were totally deprived. If we were to look at this as a modern psychologist would, we would say that Edwards was creating a moment of mental crisis. He was confronting people simultaneously with their depravity, and then he was offering a release, by telling them that they were fully responsible to repent and believe.

Edwards himself did not live long to put this into full play, but his two disciples, Samuel Hopkins from West Springfield, Massachusetts; and Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut; they did.

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American Puritanism

In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther raised the banner of theological rebellion against the authority of the Catholic Church in what has become universally known as the Protestant Reformation. In Switzerland, a French protestant named John Calvin reconstituted the organization of the Church. The Church had always been a hierarchy, with the bishop of dioceses at the top and the Pope in Rome as the bishop of the bishops; the priests below and the lay people underneath. Calvin refashioned this hierarchy, with priests now renamed as elders or presbyters ruling the churches jointly with lay leaders. Calvin also refined and expanded Luther’s theological protests, so that a uniquely Calvinist protestant theology eventually emerged.

King Henry VIII of England brought his kingdom into the Protestant column in the 1530’s guided strictly by a political desire to get the Pope’s meddling fingers out of his realm. Henry lived and died with the notion that he could deny the sovereignty of the Pope in England while retaining traditional Catholic theology and the structure of bishops, priests and people; only with himself rather than the Pope at the top of the hierarchy. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, who became Queen of England in 1558, settled matters down in pretty much the shape her father had expected.

Elizabeth made life exceptionally nasty for anyone who clung to the old Catholic ways. Any kind of affection for Catholicism was treated by Elizabeth in England as treason. But life could be as nasty for those English protestants who felt that Elizabeth had left entirely too many of the old Catholic ways in place. They considered Calvin as the model and solution for English Christianity. Elizabeth regarded them as been fully as much apart as the Catholics. These were the people who became known first as Precicians, because they wanted to be too precise about Church reformation. Then eventually as Puritans.

In this articles we will try to understand Puritan thinking, how they came to America looking for freedom of religion, and how they had a lasting impact in the American mind.

• The Essence of Puritan Thinking and the Exodus to the Americas: Leaving 17th century England was a little like trying to leave the old Soviet Union. Unless you had a very plausible reason, the attempt was interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction. They organized themselves as a commercial enterprise, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and they were all going to make their fortunes in America. Within ten years, the Massachusetts Bay Company welcomed several thousand Puritan refugees and set up a string of thriving towns stretching Westward from the principal settlement Boston.
  

• The Influence of Separatism Over Harvard and the First Generation of Americans: Harvard was not a college similar to what we might think of colleges now. The principal source of truth was authority, not nature. The principal language was Latin, with the principal authority being Aristotle.

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Religious Radicalism as a Factor of the American Revolution

Forty years after the beginning of the American Revolution, the two most famous theorists of the Revolution, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, exchanged opinions on how the American colonies could have thrown off British rule so completely, and then on top of that, institute in their new government so complete a repudiation of the British example of government. Adams, gently reminded Jefferson that the change was not nearly so dramatic as he thought. The Revolution, said Adams, was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed.

Adams was not only right but probably more right than he thought, in the sense that ideas which paved the rout to American independence had been there for much longer, even more than 15 years.

One source was John Locke. Thomas Jefferson, who preferred to see himself as an original thinker, did not like being told that the Declaration of Independence he was delegated to write in 1776 sounded like it was copied from Locke’s treatises on government. But even Jefferson admitted that Locke’s little book on government is perfect as far as it goes. Still, Locke was hardly the only figure on the horizon of American minds before 1776. The Enlightenment as a whole contributed a general resistance to the notion that traditional authorities, including kings and parliaments, had to be deferred to; while the Scottish common sense philosophy offered a particular source of alternative authority in the shared natural sense of truth and right which everyone was supposed to possess, whether they were princes or peasants.

Above all, in the most hard-headed sense, it was the penny-pinching attitude of the imperial government that led the colonies to put the necessity of self-government in the first place. The colonies were astounded at the prospect of parliament trying to change those rules, so to speak, in midstream.

In 1843, when one of the last survivors of the Revolution’s first fight at Lexington was interviewed about the reasons for taking up arms against the British, he was quizzed about whether he had been reading Harrington and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty. I’ve never heard of these men, answered Levi Preston. The questioner, Mellen Chamberlain, then asked: Well, then, what was the matter? Young man, Preston replied, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to, they didn’t mean we should.

Religious Rebellion in New York

Let’s not underestimate another source of resistance, the religious radicalism that went into founding so many of the colonies, not only the Puritans of New England, but the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Baptists of Rhode Island had their roots in dissent from an established State Church. And even other immigrant religious groups, like Scot-Irish Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Dutch Calvinists in New York, German Lutherans and Roman Catholics, all of them acted outside the circle of the protestant Church of England culture; and that could lead to political dissent the moment this sense of alienation and being on the margin attached itself to political grievances.

In 1746, the New York assembly decided to establish a college in New York city on a par with Yale, Harvard and the other colonial colleges. As a Crown colony, however, the assembly assumed that the New York college, like Oxford and Cambridge, would have to be a Church of England's college. In other words, its faculty would have to be communicants of the Church of England, the required worship and religious instruction would have to be Church of England’s, and most likely, its students would have at least to publicly conform to the Church of England. But New York had originally been founded by the Dutch, and when the English seized the city in 1664, part of the settlement that allowed for peaceful transition was in agreement not to force the Church of England down Calvinist throats. The result was that New York became a mixed multitude of Dutch reformed Churches, Presbyterians, Quakers, Jews, Baptists; while the actual Anglican communicants of the colony numbered no more than 20% of the population.

For non-Anglicans, the notion that public revenues were going to fund an Anglican college looked like picking their pockets to create a machine whose graduates would proselytize and undermine their Churches. And their dim view of things was not helped by the selection of the Connecticut apostate, Samuel Johnson, as the first president.

In the summer of 1753, shortly before the new King’s College was opened, a terrific pamphlet war broke out in New York, led by the wealthy Presbyterian William Livingston. This was significant for what was to follow. Livingston bases his religious suspicions of the King’s College project on an appeal to Locke’s notion of government. Rulers and magistrates, argued Livingston, occupy their places as men above the rest dependent upon the free exercise of the will of the later for the good of the whole. That obligated the magistrates to the pursuit of the welfare of the community, not to the exercise of favoritism toward one part of it. The transformation of King’s College from a publicly funded college into what Samuel Johnson unwisely called an Anglican seminary was precisely such a perversion. At that moment, Livingston argued, people may consider themselves as in the State of Nature, which authorized resistance and the formation of a new government.

In the end, Livingston campaign failed. King’s College opened its doors in the springs of 1754 with Samuel Johnson at its head. But Johnson was forced to back off on restricting the college only to Anglican communicants. And in 1763, the trustees forced Johnson into retirement and began a process of making King’s into a professional school for New York’s wealthy upper classes.

This is only what happened in places like New York, where the Presbyterianism of William Livingston was still comparatively mild stuff. Among those touched by the Great Awakening, the scorch of revival tended to re-arouse all the anti-authoritarian intellectual habits that a century of occupation and settling down had tended to obscure. Whitefield’s come back with the “Old Lights”, the disruption of Yale by David Brainerd, and Jonathan Edwards’ dismissal from Northampton in 1750 were only the best-known examples of the ease with which religion could rouse the spirit of Puritan contention.

The Religion of Virginia

The Great Awakening came later to Virginia than anywhere else in British North America, since Virginia was complacently Church of England’s and commercial in spirit. But Virginia soon acquired a radical tradition. Through the 1750’s and 1760’s, Scot-Irish Presbyterian migrants from Pennsylvania came to the Shenandoah Valley carrying with them much of Presbyterianism’s Calvinistic fervor. Poor Virginia whites flocked after Scot-Irish evangelical preachings. By 1772, as many as 10% of the whites had joined the most wildly individualistic and self-assertive of all of the Awakening’s churches, the Baptists.

This posed a challenge to the Anglican ascendancy in Virginia, not only because the Baptists increasingly resisted paying taxes to support the Church of England in Virginia, but also because the strict moralism of these evangelical Baptists called the hedonistic life styles of the great planters into question. A Virginian great planter shook his head in despair over this development. The indisposition to our people, he said, proves that we are verging fast towards Republicanism and Puritanism, this to me seems sufficient reason for the King sending a bishop among us, who I hope would in some measure contribute to track a spirit so adverse to our present happy form of government.

He could wish as much like, because there would be no bishop sent to Virginia. One reason being the old problem of the British empire’s reluctance to spend its own cash for anything in America. Instead, the American colonies were treated as an ecclesiastical extension of the Church of England’s dioceses of London. No Bishop of London ever took the trouble to visit America. Instead, the Bishop appointed a commissary to represent his interests there. The Bishop’s commissaries proved to be very skilled at staying out of trouble.

But the more compelling reason why there would be no Bishop was that the colonies, plainly, would not stand for it. Too many of them had left the established Church behind them in coming to America to welcome it catching up with them. Too many of them had acquired too much experience in running their own church affairs to want some Anglican running them. Even the most unpuritanical certainly did not want to be taxed for the benefit of an Anglican Bishop.

It took no great difficulty for any of this people to treat efforts by the imperial government to extend its secular powers over the colonies in precisely the same way. Even in laying the very foundations of the American republic, Puritanism and the Enlightenment, far from being at each other’s throats, were already stirring the American soup together.

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Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703. The son of Timothy Edwards, a Congregationalist pastor in East Windsor, Connecticut; and of Esther Stoddard, who’s father Solomon Stoddard was the pastor of the church of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the most powerful ecclesiastical figure in Western New England. From both sides of his family, Jonathan Edwards inherited a distrust of what was going on in Boston and at Harvard.

His grandfather Stoddard had decided as early as 1660 that restricted Church membership only to those who could make a public confession of receiving God’s grace was a recipe for marginalizing the Church’s impact on society. Only a few in Northampton would ever come forward with claims so staggering, Stoddard argued. The rest will drift off to the sidelines of the Church, where the opportunity to experience that grace might never happen.

Stoddard not only threw down the barriers the first generation of Puritans in New England had put in place, but threw even the half-way covenant which had been invented as a partial membership system to the winds, and invited every member of the town to Baptism and communion. As for Harvard, the churches and the settlements of the Connecticut River Valley had long suspicions about the weak theological leaders that governed intellectual affairs in Cambridge. That is why Connecticut Puritans decided to found their own college in 1701: Yale.

Education

The young Edwards, just under the age of 13, was sent to Yale, even though the college had not yet even worked out a permanent location. It finally settled in New Haven. His education rested on the English and Dutch protestant scholastics. But whether anyone was particularly noticing it or not, Yale’s rector, Timothy Cutler, also assigned William Brattle’s Cartesian New Logic to the students, as well as the study of John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. Edwards applied himself to these innovations in the curriculum reluctantly. Not because he lacked a taste for philosophy, but because he greatly preferred the old logic. Yet that did not prevented him from arising to the top of his class intellectually. When he graduated from Yale, the choice for giving the valedictory fell to Edwards.

Despite his loyalty to the “old logic”, Edwards could not keep his curiosity from wandering to the new philosophy. By the time he graduated, he began dabbling in two scientific essays, on insects and on spiders. He began keeping commonplace books with his own speculations on epistemology and natural science. Once outside of Yale, he briefly server as pastor to a small congregation in New York City, but in June 1724, he accepted an invitation from Yale to return as a tutor. He spent the next three years working out more deeply his explorations into epistemology, pursuing a more clear and immediate view of God, concerning his operation with matter and bodies. And rather than embracing an outright naturalism (that all substance is material), or dualism (that material and spiritual substances coexist), Edwards was gradually pulled to an immaterialism similar to that of Bishop Berkeley; in which that which is truly the substance of all bodies is the infinite, exact, precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind.

As Pastor of Northampton

There was, however, little professional future for junior tutors at Yale. In November 1726, the Northampton church called Edwards to become his grandfather’s Stoddart assistant pastor. Edwards was ordained by the Northampton church on February 1727, and in 1729, after his grandfather’s death, Edwards became pastor of the town. The notations in his philosophical notebooks trailed off, as the demands of a busy pastor were over him. But from time to time they surfaced again in Edwards’ sermons, where it became clear that for Edwards, immaterialism had become an effective weapon for the defense of traditional Calvinism. Invited in 1731 to deliver a public lecture at Boston, Edwards warned against the tendency of man to depend on his own power and goodness, which was good Calvinist theology. The reasoning behind this is strongly influenced by the new philosophical immaterialism: God acts in immaterialist fashion as an extrinsic occasional agent on the mind. Whatever ideas we have are the products not of sensation, nor of the mind as a machine, but of the direct action of God.

Echoing the European Awakeners, Edwards was careful not to make this action simply a matter of God presenting ideas directly to the mind and leaving the mind to do with it what it pleased. God’s action works not upon the reason or ratiocination, but upon a sense of the heart, which immediately perceives a beauty, a divine and transcendent glory in God. Edwards thus made immaterialist philosophy serve the interest of Calvinist piety.

The Awakenings

The promotion of piety became Edwards’ particular burden in the 1730’s. Specially when in 1734 a very remarkable blessing of heaven fell on Northampton. In the Puritan path, the experience of religious conversion had been largely a matter of individual spiritual renewal, under the careful direction of pastors and family elders. The novelty introduced by the Awakeners of the 18th century was to turn the experience of grace into a communal experience, a group revival of religion that could involve whole towns, sometimes entire regions. Solomon Stoddart, with his eye always on the improvement of his parish, had welcomed several small revivals like these in Northampton; and so had Edwards’ father, Timothy Edwards, in their home parish in East Windsor. But this revival, which occurred in 1735, saw, as Edwards described it, more than three hundred souls saved and brought home to Christ in his town.

Not only the numbers, but the character of the revival was, as Edwards said, unprecedented. It involved not only males and females alike, but children as young as four years old. An outburst of enthusiasm and worship, some, he said, weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, other with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors. Edwards struggled both to defend and analyze this eruption in “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God”, which was published in England in 1737.

Edwards had hardly digested the lessons of the 1734 revival before a second wave of awakenings came to Northampton in 1740, on the shoulders of the celebrated English preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield had emerged as one of the princes of the European Awakeners. A preacher of fabulous talent, dramatic intensity and superb self-confidence. In 1737, he dedicated himself to establishing an orphanage in the new American colony of Georgia, and undertook a fundraising-preaching tour of the colonies, which quickly turned into a riot of awakenings. What had been mere awakenings now became the Great Awakening in British North America. Whitefield came to Northampton to preach and to recognize Edwards as a fellow laborer. The outbreak of revivals consumed not only Edwards’ Northampton, but much of Western New England.

Whifield’s preaching also generated angry criticism from both the Boston elite, who spurned revivals as raw enthusiasm; and from nervous country persons who feared the destabilizing effect of mass revivals on the peace of their folks. By 1742, the New England clergy had become polarized into an old-like faction, which condemned the revivals; and a new-like faction which encouraged them and which found in Edwards its principal theorist of revivals and religious experience.

Edwards not only participated fully as a preacher in promoting revivals, but he also published three important defenses of “revivalism”: “Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God”, “Some thoughts concerning the present revival in New England”, and “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections”. Of all the three, the religious affections was Edwards’ most profound effort, laying out in 12 signs, as he put it, the distinction between true and false religion, and the right place of the emotions or affections (to avoid the pejorative term passions) in religious experience. Both, “Some thoughts concerning the present revival” and “The religious affections”, however, show signs of stress in Edwards, since the aftermath of the Greak Awakening in Northampton proved to be a severe disappointment for Edwards, as many of the awakened gradually subsided into religious indifference.

In 1744, in an ill-considered effort to stimulate genuine conversions, Edwards reimposed the test of a public confession of grace on new members of the Church, which had been abandoned by Solomon Stoddart. The Northampton Church turned with resentment on Edwards. In 1750, Edwards was forced to resign.

The Mission and the Later Philosophical Works

Thrown upon the wide ocean of the world, as he put it, Edwards accepted the offer of the Boston commissioners of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to take charge of the Indian mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 60 miles West of Northampton. He was an indifferent missionary, but the mission worked giving time to turn back to his philosophical notebooks. Between 1751 and 1757, Edwards produced two manuscript dissertations, as he called them, on ontology and ethics. The first of them, concerning the end for which God created the world; and the other on the nature of true virtue. These, plus two major treatises on Freedom of the Will, in 1754, and Original Sin in 1758.

Freedom of the Will was the greatest piece of philosophical speculation pined by an American in the 18th century, and the only one which managed to command any serious European readership. But its real intent, as in much of Edwards’ work, was not so much to articulate philosophy or embrace the Enlightenment, but rather to justify in the most enlightened vocabulary and method available the ways of God to man. Edwards had noticed how the threat of Hobbes and his bleak materialism had frightened the religious thinkers in the Enlightenment. He also noticed how Hobbes’ denial of free will caused panic even among Calvinists, who began defending human free will. This affirmation of free will is contradictory to Calvinism’s teaching that God, and not human free will, determines the outcome of all events.

Calvinists, and for that matter anyone who believes in God as more than a well-intentioned mumbler, could not run away from the fact that a God who is really God determines everything. Edwards’ great achievement was to try to demonstrate, in one logical sweep after another, how God’s determination of the will does not deprive anyone of freedom, much less force anyone over the cliff into materialism. And it was a logical sweep.

Defenses of Calvinist theology before the Great Awakening had stiffen unimaginatively into the style and rhetoric of the catechism, with certain theological axioms laid out scholastic-style, and then adorned with scriptural proof texts as if all that was needed to halt the Enlightenment’s incoming tide was a biblical quotation.

What has continuously surprised readers of Edward’s Freedom of the Will was how very unlike the catechism model his writing was. Freedom of the Will reads much more like a treatise on psychology than like an apology for Calvinism. This was because the Enlightenment was simultaneously Jonathan Edwards’ friend and enemy. His serene confidence in traditional Calvinism made him hostile to the Enlightenment’s pretensions to base human behavior on reason and nature; and it made him receptive to the notion that true spiritual harmony was possible only by overcoming the superficial allure of reason and nature. Yet, he believed just as firmly, that reason, once it was sanctified by conversion of the heart, was an instrument to be well used in examining nature. Edwards’ intellectual life was rooted in one of the Enlightenment’s principal questions about epistemology.

People who try to stay astride of conflicting intellectual movements, with one foot in one camp and one foot on another, or one foot in one answer and one foot in another; are usually destroyed by the conflict between the two. Edwards is that rare exception, who instead, turns conflicts into a creative intellectual fusion, in this case, of Enlightenment and piety. In so doing, Edwards fashioned a new Evangelical form of piety, a form which would become one of the two great long-term forces in the history of American ideas.

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