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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Jefferson’s Separation Between Church and State

I’ve spent some time writing about Jonathan Edwards. I have to admit that I did live it dangling there, and you would be right to wonder what really happened to him after his self-exile to the Western Massachusetts Indian mission. Well, the answer is: not very much. Edwards hoped in his heart that the Great Awakening would lead to the Day of Judgement, and the thousand years reign of God directly on earth, when religion shall in every respect be uppermost in the world. But instead of the dawning of a general revival of the Christian Church, what Edwards got was the day to day routine of attending a mission to Indians whose language he did not speak, and an English congregation whose attention span was, in Edwards’ Judgement, not up to one of a kid.

His own attention soon went back to his early enchantment with philosophy. Between 1750 and 1757, he composed three great treatises in moral philosophy, on Original Sin, on Freedom of the Will, and the Nature of True Virtue; all awhile praying for a new Awakening, until the trustees of Princeton invited him to take up the presidency there in 1757. He goes there at the beginning of 1758, only to find that smallpox is in the neighborhood. He takes the inoculation, but the inoculation turns out to be more lethal than the smallpox. He dies of the complications.

What ultimately follows on the hills of the Great Awakening was not the new awakening Edwards hoped for, but a secular revolution. The leadership of the colonial Churches was not better prepared for the revolution than it had been for the Great Awakening. The vast majority of New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians supported the American cause. Even the Church of England, since it was legally a department of the English government, lost three quarters of its American clergy who exiled in England or Canada.

The Secular Revolution

For those Congregationalists and Presbyterians who joined the revolution, the war was seemed as a marvelous opportunity to condemn the corrupt commercialized society of Great Britain and any of its American partners and admirers. They also looked upon the Revolution as an opportunity to earn a special place of respect for Christianity in the construction of this new republic. This was, however, exactly what did not happen. The disruptions created by occupation, invasion and enlistments battered all of the Churches equally.

The Philadelphia's Baptist association saw its congregations decline from 42 to 26. Its membership dropped down by a fifth. Moreover, the revolutionary leadership was conformed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Hamilton, James Madison. These all were men with little interest in Christian theology, and whose case against the British was fed by secular political theory. Instead of leading the Revolution, the clergy of the American Churches found themselves being used by it. When the Revolution was over, instead of having a new public role for the Churches of American society, they found that they had lost almost all the vestige of the public roles they once had.

New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware eliminated all public funding for Churches in 1776. New York followed in 1777. In Massachusetts, the new revolutionary Constitution of 1780 kept public tax support for the Congregational Churches enforced, but it did not allow tax payers to send their tax money to Churches of their own choosing.

Virginia suspended taxation for the support of the Church of England in 1776, and in an effort to nail exclusion down more securely, Thomas Jefferson wrote a statute for religious freedom, adopted by the Virginia Assembly in 1786, with the support of Madison. It confirmed that “no man should be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever”. Jefferson statute for religious freedom was only the most famous of the efforts that Jefferson and Madison made to force religion off the public square.

The Wall of Separation

Sitting in the Confederation Congress in 1785, Madison actually opposed a plan to reserve public lands for the support of religion. Jefferson preferred putting the most useful facts from Greek, Roman, European and American history into the hands of children rather than the Bible. His 1817 plan for a system of public education in Virginia decreed that “no religious reading, instruction or exercise shall be prescribed or practiced”.

The involvement of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia’s dismantling of public religion gave the final blow to the hopes of the churches that the Revolution and the Millennium could be had for the same price. Congress stipulated that the first amendment shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting their free exercise thereof. Now, although technically this no-establishment clause only addressed the Federal government, and left states like Massachusetts free to establish state churches or state funding; it clearly set a direction to public policy that was not friendly towards an official seat for religion on the public square.

“Religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god”, Jefferson wrote sympathetically to a group of unhappy Connecticut Baptists, who had to put up with paying state taxes for religion until 1817. “I contemplate, said Jefferson, with sovereign reverence, those Americans who declare that their legislatures should make no law respecting and establishing religion, or prohibiting their free exercise thereof. Thus, building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

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.

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The Colonial Colleges in America

One of the gifts of the Great Awakening to British North America was the founding of new colleges: Princeton, Rhode Island College, which became Brown University; Queen’s College, founded by Dutch sympathizers with the Awakening in New Jersey; and Dartmouth College, which began as a missionary school for Indians, but it was moved by its founder to New Hampshire. These were only the colleges most directly nurtured by the awakening. Two others: the College of Philadelphia and King’s College in New York City, which was renamed Columbia after the American Revolution; also in varying degrees bore the footprint of the Awakening.

The College of Philadelphia was organized as an academy in a meeting hall in Philadelphia originally built to accommodate that grand itinerant George Whitefield on his many preaching tours. The academy organizers quickly ensured that both the academy and the college that superseded it were kept safe from Whitefield’s evangelical enthusiasm. And King’s College, which opened its doors in 1754, was deliberately designed to draw enthusiasm for the Church of England, which was struggling for representatives in the colonies. Its first president, Samuel Johnson, had actually been one of the Yale apostates from Congregationalism back in 1722.

Whitefield and the Colleges

That the Awakeners were interested in founding colleges at all may seem unusual, given the cold shoulder that Harvard and then Yale turned to the Great Awakening. George Whitefield had visited Harvard during his first great preaching tour in New England in 1740, and he found Harvard “scarcely as big as one of our least colleges at Oxford”. After all, Harvard had only one president, four tutors and about one hundred students. But worst still, “it was not far superior to our universities in piety”. This is a judgement that Whitefield did not intend as a compliment. “At Harvard, bad books are becoming fashionable among the tutors and students”.

When Whitefield journals were published, Harvard’s old-like president, Edward Holyoke, was not amused, and in December 1744, Holyoke and the Harvard faculty went to publish “The Testimony of Harvard College Against George Whitefield”, accusing Whitefield of enthusiasm and delusive management of the money he had been raising for his orphanage, and just accusing him of a general spirit of anti-intellectualism.

None of this gave Whitefield much pause because the “new-lights”, like their pious counterparts in England, Germany and in Netherlands; had an entirely different notion of how human psychology worked. The Enlightenment’s glorification of reason and nature was all well and good, argued the pious, but only when we don’t forget the limits placed upon the operation of reason by the countervailing power of the other faculties, specially the will. The celebrated German pietist, August Hermann Francke, confesses that as a theology student in Lutheran Germany, he had originally understood Christianity only in “my reason and in my thought”, it wasn’t until he had experienced repentance that “all sadness and unrest of my heart was taken all at once and I was immediately overwhelmed by a stream of joy, and gave praise to whom had shown so great grace.”

This is not necessarily an anti-intellectual stance. It was, in fact, little more than an updating of scholastic-style voluntarism. And it was shared, without any dimming of intellectual energy, by Blaise Pascal, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. But it could easily sound anti-intellectual. Nor was Whitefield, as an Oxford graduate, an intellectual slouch; but when he warned Holyoke that “learning without piety will only render you more capable of promoting the kingdom of the devil”, Whitefield was leaving the Awakening open to abuse, as much as Harvard’s embrace of reason had left it vulnerable to the blandishments of religion.

The Awakening in Yale

The dimensions of that abuse showed up not at Harvard, but in Yale, in 1741. Thomas Clap had taken over as rector of Yale in April of 1740. He was determined to overhaul the students and the curriculum to move Yale from a good state to a perfect one. And mistaking Whitefield with a vehicle for accomplishing that, Clap unwisely invited Whitefield to preach to the students on 1740. Whitefield was even less impressed by Yale than he had been by Harvard. “It has one rector, three tutors and about one hundred students, and with no remarkable concern among them concerning religion”.

But in Yale’s case, things did not stay that way. Over the next three months, the spiritual life of Yale College was quickened. The students in general became serious, Jonathan Edwards recorded, much engaged in the concerns of their eternal welfare. But they also became tumultuous and rebellious against what Whitefield had darkly described as an unconverted ministry.

James Davenport, a Yale graduate of 1732 and then Whitefield wannabe, showed up in Connecticut claiming direct inspiration from God and sponsoring a bonfire of books, principally on divinity. While the books where in the flames, Davenport cried out “thus the souls of the authors of those books, those of them who are dead are rusting in the flames of hell; the fate of those surviving will be the same unless speedy repentance prevent it.”

Clap tried to appease the uproar by inviting Jonathan Edwards to deliver the commencement address. But by the beginning of the next school year in September of 1741, the trustees of Yale were forced to pass a resolution threatening that “any student at this college who directly or indirectly says that the rector, either the trustees or tutors are hypocrites or unconverted men, he shall for the first offence make a public confession in the hall; and for the second offence be expelled.

And to show just how much they meant it, when a junior student, David Brainerd, snorted that one of the tutors had no more grace than a chair, rector Clap expelled him. If Clap thought he was serving an example, he was wrong. Brainerd left Yale to become a missionary to the Indians. He left in Edwards’ hands his melodramatic diary, which Edwards later published as a memorial to Brainerd’s integrity and Yale’s stinginess of heart. Brainerd’s journal went on to become one of the great religious best-sellers of the next century.

The Founding of Princeton and the Arrival of Witherspoon

Given this kind of reception, no one could be surprised if the awakeners decided to take their interests elsewhere, and begin the string of colleges that I mentioned at the beginning. But again, the result turned out to be a very mixed bag. This is because colleges founded around a valorization of the will, rather than the intellect, had a hard time justifying their existence. Usually either they disappear when the will grows weary, or allow themselves to be transformed into holes of reason just like the others, simply to justify their existence.

The College of New Jersey, Princeton, became something of a marker of how difficult it was to sustain the will for revival within the tight structure of 18th century college education. Founded through the initiative of Whitefield’s Presbyterian admirers, Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr. the new college was generally perceived as a statement of protest by New Lights against Yale’s treatment of David Brainerd. If it had not been for the treatment received by Mr. Brainerd at Yale, Aaron Burr remarked, New Jersey College would never have been erected.

On the other hand, the college had trouble trying to keep going the same way that Brainerd did. The first of the presidents of the college of New Jersey, Jonathan Dickinson, was a Yale graduate class of 1706, who had been minister to a community of New England migrants in Elizabeth town, New Jersey. Within a year of founding the college, Dickinson was dead. So, leadership of the college was transferred to Aaron Burr, who’s principle credential for the job was that he happened to be Jonathan Edwards’ son-in-law. Burr moved the college in 1733 to land contributed to the college trustees by the town fathers of the village of Princeton. It delighted Esther Edwards Burr, the wife of Aaron Burr, to find a considerable awakening in the college. By February of 1757 it looked to her exactly like God’s descending into the temple in a cloud of glory. But Aaron Burr died of malaria that fall, and when the trustees brought Jonathan Edwards to Princeton as his son-in-law successor, Edwards died as well.

For the next decade, election as president of Princeton came increasingly to look like the kiss of death. Samuel Davies succeeded Edwards but collapsed and died on the strain of the work in February 1761. Davies was followed by Samuel Finley, who actually survived for five years in office before death removed him too in July of 1766. By this point, the fires of controversy over the Great Awakening had cooled considerably, and in 1758, the quarreling factions among the Presbyterians had worked a reconciliation, which they hoped to crown by recruiting as the next president of Princeton a Presbyterian, who, if not exactly the first choice of anyone, was at least the least objectionable choice in everyone’s mind: John Witherspoon. He was neither identified with the pro-awakening or anti-awakening factions, largely because he was a Scotsman and never been in America.

The arrival of John Witherspoon in Princeton in 1768 has always been regarded as something of a watershed in American intellectual life. And with good reason. For one thing, he actually lived long enough in Princeton, until 1794, to make a difference as the college’s president. Long enough, in fact, to serve in the continental congress as one of New Jersey’s representatives, and to sign the Declaration of Independence, the only clergyman to do so. For another thing, Witherspoon was successful in making moderation into an aggressive quality rather than just an exercise in appeasement. Witherspoon carried with him the old-worldish sense of the Church’s place within society and the theory of the sacramental educational religion. Not the separatism, not the voluntarism, and not the wild fire conversion enthusiasm of the Awakening.

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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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