Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 - March 22, 1758) was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher and theologian of Congregationalist Protestantism. Like most Puritans, he holds to Reformed theology. His colonial followers then distinguished themselves from other Congregationalists as "New Lights" (supporting the Great Awakening), as opposed to "Old Lights" (non-revivalists). Edwards is widely regarded as "one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians". Edwards's theology has a wide scope, but it is rooted in Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage. Recent studies have emphasized how Edwards thoroughly based his life's work on the concept of beauty, harmony, and ethical conformity, and how central Enlightenment is to his mindset. Edwards played an important role in shaping the First Awakening, and oversaw the first few revivals in 1733-35 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Edwards preached the sermon of "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God", an early American literary class, during another revival in 1741, following the journey of George Whitefield to the Thirteen Colonies. Edwards is famous for his many books, The End For That God Creating the World, The Life of David Brainerd, which inspired thousands of missionaries throughout the nineteenth century, and Video Jonathan Edwards (theologian)
Biography
Early life
Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 and was the son of Timothy Edwards (1668-1759), a minister in East Windsor, Connecticut (now South Windsor), who increased his salary by teaching boys to college. His mother, Esther Stoddard, daughter of Pdt. Solomon Stoddard, from Northampton, Massachusetts, appears to have become a woman of unusual mental gifts and character independence. Jonathan, their only son, is the fifth of 11 children. He was trained for college by his father and sister, all of whom received excellent education and one of them, Esther, the oldest, wrote a semi-humorous tract on the immateriality of the soul, often misjudged with Jonathan.
He entered Yale College in 1716, just under the age of 13. The following year, he became acquainted with John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which heavily influenced him. During his studies at college, he kept his notebooks labeled "The Mind," "Natural Science" (containing a discussion of atomic theory), "The Scriptures" and "Miscellanies," had major plans for a work of natural and mental philosophy. , and set up its own rules for its composition. He is interested in natural history, and as an 11 year old adult, observes and writes essays detailing the swollen behavior of some spiders. Edwards will edit this text to match the evolving genre of scientific literature, and his "The Flying Spider" easily enters into the scholarship that was then in the spider. Although he will continue to study theology for two years after his graduation, Edwards remains interested in science. Yet while many European scientists and American priests find science implications pushing them toward deism, Edwards goes the other way, and sees the natural world as evidence of God's design, and throughout his life, Edwards often goes to the forest as a favorite place to pray and worship in the beauty and comfort of nature.
Edwards was fascinated by the discovery of Isaac Newton and other scientists his age. Before he worked full-time in Northampton, he wrote various topics in natural philosophy, including flying spiders, light and optics. While he worries about materialism and faith in his own reasons from some of his contemporaries, he sees the laws of nature as coming from God and shows his wisdom and attention. Edwards also wrote sermons and theological treatises that emphasize God's beauty and aesthetic role in the spiritual life, in which he anticipates a 20th century theological theology, represented by such figures as Hans Urs von Balthasar.
In 1722 to 1723, he for eight months "declared inventory" (a minister employed to provide the pulpit for a definite time, but did not settle as pastor) of the small Presbyterian Church in New York City. The Church invited him to stay, but he refused the call. After spending two months studying at home, in 1724-26, he was one of two teachers at Yale, gaining his own name of "pillar teacher", from his steadfast loyalty to his college and orthodoxy, at the time of Yale's rector Timothy Cutler, his tutor, Daniel Brown, his former mentor, Samuel Johnson, and four local ministers, has declared for the Anglican Church.
The years 1720 to 1726 are partially recorded in his diary and in resolutions for his own behavior he currently draws. He had long been a passionate seeker after salvation and was not entirely satisfied with his own conversion until his last years in college, when he lost his feeling that some election for salvation and others for eternal damnation was "a terrible doctrine," and reckoned "very pleasant, bright and sweet." He now takes great joy and newness in taking the beauty of nature, and is delighted in the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs. Balancing this mystical pleasure is the firm tone of his Resolutions, in which he is almost imprisoned in his desire to live earnestly and simply, not wasting time, to maintain simplicity in eating and drinking. On February 15, 1727, Edwards was ordained minister in Northampton and assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. He is a clergyman, not a visiting minister, his government 13 hours a day study.
That same year, he married Sarah Pierpont. Then 17, Sarah comes from a family of storied New England clerics: his father is James Pierpont (1659-1714), founding head of Yale College, and his mother is the great-grandson of Thomas Hooker. Sarah's spiritual devotion without colleagues, and her relationship with God has long proved to be an inspiration for Edwards. He first remarked on his great piety when he was 13 years old. He is a bright and cheerful man, a practical housekeeper, an exemplary wife and the mother of his 11 children, which includes Esther Edwards. Solomon Stoddard died on 11 February 1729, surrendering to his grandson the difficult task of the only ministerial duties of one of the largest and richest sessions in the colony, and who was proud of his morality, culture and reputation. Edwards, like all the Reformers and Puritans of his day, adhered to the supplementary view of marriage and the role of gender.
Great Awakening
On July 8, 1731, Edwards preached in Boston "Public Lecture" was later published under the title "God Glorified in the Redemption, by the Greatness of Human Dependence on Him, in All," which was his first public attack on Arminianism. The emphasis of the lecture is on God's absolute sovereignty in the work of salvation: that when God has the power to create pure and innocent humanity, it is "good pleasure" and "mercy and arbitrary" for him to give the person the faith necessary to push him the direction of holiness, and that God may deny this grace without contempt for his character. In 1733, the Protestant revival began in Northampton and reached an intensity in the winter of 1734 and the following spring, which threatened the city's business. In 6 months, nearly 300 out of 1100 youth were accepted into the church.
The revival gave Edwards the opportunity to study the conversion process in all phases and manifolds, and he recorded his observations with psychological honesty and discrimination in A Faithful Narrative of God's Shocking Work in Conversion of Many Hundreds of Souls in Northampton (1737). A year later, he published the Discourse on the Various Important Subjects, five sermons that proved most effective in revival, and from this, nothing was so effective then in the Divine Justice in the Damnation of Sinners , from the text, "That every mouth can be stopped." Another sermon, published in 1734, Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Manifested to the Soul by the Spirit of God, establishes what he considers to be an inner principle, moving from revival, the doctrine of a special grace in divine illumination direct, and supernatural of the soul.
In 1735, revivals had spread and appeared independently in the Connecticut River Valley, and possibly as far as New Jersey. However, criticism of the revival began, and many New Englanders feared that Edwards had led his people into fanaticism. During the summer of 1735, religious zeal grew dark. A number of New Englanders were shaken by revival but unrepentant, and became convinced of their inevitable curse. Edwards writes that "many people" feel urged - perhaps by Satan - to take their own lives. At least two people committed suicide at the depths of their spiritual pressure, one from Edwards's own congregation - his uncle Joseph Hawley II. It is unknown if anyone else took their own life, but "suicide craze" effectively ended the first wave of awakening, except in some parts of Connecticut.
Yet despite this setback and a boiling religious spirit, Northampton's revival and Edwards leadership role have spread as far as England and Scotland. It was at this point that Edwards became acquainted with George Whitefield, who traveled to the Thirteenth Colony on a revival tour of 1739-40. The two men may not see firsthand every detail. Whitefield was much more comfortable with elements of a strong emotional awakening than Edwards, but they were both eager to preach the gospel. They work together to organize a Whitefield trip, first through Boston and then to Northampton. When Whitefield preached at the Edwards church in Northampton, he reminded them of the revival they had experienced several years earlier. It really touched Edwards, who cried throughout the service, and many congregations were also touched.
Revival began to reemerge, and Edwards preached his most famous sermon "The Sinners in the Hand of Angry God", in Enfield, Connecticut in 1741. Although this sermon has been reprinted extensively as an example of the "fire and brimstone" in a colonial revival, this does not fit Edward's actual style of preaching. Edwards did not shout or speak loudly, but spoke in a calm and emotional voice. He moved his listener slowly from one point to another, to an inexorable conclusion: they were lost without God's grace. While most of the readers of the 21st century notice the curse that appears in the text of such a sermon, historian George Marsden reminds us that Edwards' does not preach something new or surprising: "Edwards can take it for granted... that New England people know well The gospel of improvement, the problem is getting them to look for it. "
This movement was opposed by conservative congressionalists. In 1741, Edwards was published in his defense of the Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, primarily pertaining to the most criticized phenomenon: fainting, screaming and convulsions. This "physical effect", he insists, does not distinguish the signs of the work of the Spirit of God in one way or another; but very bitter was the feeling of opposing revival in the tighter Puritan churches, which in 1742, he was forced to write a second apology, Thought of Awakening in New England . The main argument is a great moral national increase. In the same pamphlet, he defends the call to emotion, and supports the terrorist reporting as needed, even to the children, which in God's sight "is a young serpent... if it is not Christ's."
He considered the "physical effect" associated with God's real work, but his own mystical devotion and his wife's experience during Awakening (which he gave in detail) led him to think that the divine visit usually defeated the power of the body, the view in support he quoted Scripture. In answer to Edwards, Charles Chauncy wrote the Emotional Thinking about the State of Religion in New England in 1743 and was anonymously written The End of Festivals in New England Considered in the same year. In these works he encourages behavior as the only test of repentance; and the general conventions of Congregational ministers in the Massachusetts Bay province protest "against the disturbance in practice that has recently been acquired in different parts of the land." Regardless of Edwards's capable pamphlet, the impression has been widespread that the "bodily effects" are recognized by the Great Awakening promoters as the true test of repentance.
To compensate for these feelings, Edwards preached in Northampton, during 1742 and 1743, a series of sermons published under the title of Religious Concern (1746), a reiteration in a more philosophical and general tone of ideas for "distinguishing marks. " In 1747, he joined the movement that began in Scotland called the "concert in prayer," and in the same year published a Low Effort to Promote the Explicit Agreement and Unity of God's People Visible in the Extraordinary Prayer for the Rise of Religion and the Progress of the Kingdom of Christ on Earth . In 1749, he published the memoirs of David Brainerd who had lived with his family for several months and had died in Northampton in 1747. Brainerd was constantly attended by Edwards' daughter, Jerusha, to whom he was rumored to be engaged to marry, although there was no evidence of survival live from this. In the course of elaborating his conversion theories, Edwards uses Brainerd and his ministry as a case study, making extensive notes on his conversion and confession.
Next year
While Edwards had slaves for most of his adult life, he experienced a change of heart in terms of Atlantic slave trade. Although he bought a newly imported slave named Venus in 1731, Edwards denounced the practice of importing slaves from Africa in a pamphlet in 1741.
After being discharged from the pastor, he served the Mohican Indian tribe in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1748, there was a crisis in relation to his congregation. The Half-Way Agreement, adopted by synods 1657 and 1662, has made baptism a necessary condition for the civil rights of church membership, but not participation in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Edwards's grandfather and predecessor at the priest, Solomon Stoddard, even more liberally, assume that the Banquet is a conversion rule and that baptism is a sufficient title for all church privileges.
In early 1744, Edwards, in his sermon on Religious Care, clearly indicated his displeasure with this practice. That same year, he has published in a church that meets the names of certain young people, members of the church, who are suspected of reading unworthy books, and also the names of those who will be called as witnesses in this case. It is often reported that witnesses and defendants are not distinguished in this list, so the whole congregation is in an uproar. However, research by Patricia Tracy has cast doubt on the version of this show, noting that in the list she reads from, the names are clearly distinguished. Those involved were ultimately disciplined for disrespecting the investigators â € Edwards' preaching became unpopular. For four years, no candidate was present for his own entrance into the church, and when finally, in 1748, he met the formal test of Edwards as stated in Distinguishing Sign Ã, and then at Qualification for Full Communities , 1749 Ã, . Candidates refuse to submit to them, the church supports him, and the break between church and Edwards is over. Even the permission to discuss his views in the pulpit is rejected. He was allowed to present his views on Thursday afternoon. His sermons were attended by many visitors, but not his own congregation. A council is held to decide the issue of the alliance between the minister and his people. The congregation elects half board, and Edwards is allowed to choose the other half of the council. His congregation, however, limited his choice to an area where a majority of ministers opposed him. The ecclesiastical council voted that pastoral relations be dissolved. Church members, with a vote of more than 200 to 23, ratified the council's action, and finally a town meeting voted that Edwards should not be allowed to occupy the pulpit of Northampton, even though he continued to live in the city and preached in the Church at the request of the congregation until October 1751. In the "Farewell Sermon" which he preached from 2 Corinthians 1:14 and directs the minds of his people to a distant future when ministers and their people will stand before God. In a letter to Scotland after his dismissal, he expressed his preference for the Presbyterian to the congregation's government. His position at that time was not popular throughout New England. His doctrine that the Lord's Supper is not the cause of regeneration and that the communion must embrace Protestantism ever since (largely through the efforts of his disciple Joseph Bellamy) became the standard of New England Congregationalism. Edwards is in great demand. A parish in Scotland could be obtained, and he was summoned to the church of Virginia. He rejected both, becoming 1751, a church pastor in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and a missionary to the Indian Housatonis, taking over for the newly deceased John sergeant. To the Indians, he preached through an interpreter, and their interests boldly and successfully defended by attacking whites who used their official position among them to increase their personal wealth. During this time he should know Judge Joseph Dwight who became Indian School Guardian. In Stockbridge, he wrote Humble Relation , also called Reply to Williams (1752), which was the answer to Solomon Williams (1700-76), a relative and a bitter opponent Edwards about qualifying for full fellowship. He there compiled treatises in which his reputation as a philosophical theologian lies primarily, essays on Original Sin, a Dissertation on the True Nature of Virtue, the Dissertation of the End which God created. The World , and the great work on Will , was written in four and a half months, and published in 1754 under the heading, Investigation into the Modern Prevailing Notions Respecting the Freedom of Will which is Important for Moral Bodies . Aaron Burr, Sr., Edwards's son-in-law, died in 1757 (he married Esther Edwards five years earlier, and they have made Edwards grandfather Aaron Burr, then Vice President of the United States). Edwards felt himself in a "setback of life", and not quite into the office, but was convinced to replace Burr as president of the College of New Jersey. He arrived in January, and was installed on February 16, 1758. He gave the task of a weekly essay in theology to a senior class. Almost immediately after becoming president, Edwards, a strong proponent of smallpox inoculation, decided to inject himself to encourage others to do the same. Unfortunately, never in strong health, he died as a result of inoculation on March 22, 1758. He was buried at Princeton Cemetery. Edwards has three sons and eight daughters. Legacy
Followers Jonathan Edwards and his disciples came to be known as New Calvinist Light ministers, who were opposed to traditional Calvin Old Light ministers. Prominent students include Samuel Hollowkins, Samuel Bellamy and Jonathan Edwards son of Jonathan Edwards Jr., and Gideon Hawley. Through the practice of apprentice ministers living in the homes of older ministers, they eventually filled up a large number of pastors in the New England area. Many of the descendants of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards became prominent citizens in the United States, including Vice President Aaron Burr and President College Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Merrill Edwards Gates. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards are also ancestors of First Lady of the United States Edith Roosevelt, author O. Henry, publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday and author Robert Lowell.
Edwards' writings and beliefs continue to affect individuals and groups to this day. The early Missionary Missionary Missionary Council was influenced by Edwards' writings, as evidenced in the ABCFM journal "The Missionary Herald," and begins with Perry Miller's seminal work, Edwards enjoys a resurgence among scholars after the end of Secondary. World War. The Banner of Truth Trust and other publishers continue to reprint Edwards' works, and most of his major work is now available through the three-decade-long series published by Yale University Press and supplying an important introduction by the editor of each volume. Yale has also set up Project Jonathan Edwards online. Author and teacher, Elisabeth Woodbridge Morris, memorialized her, her father's forefather (3rd great-grandfather) in two books, The Jonathan Papers (1912), and More Jonathan Papers (1915)). In 1933, he became the name of Jonathan Edwards College, the first of 12 residential colleges at Yale, and The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University was founded to provide scientific information about Edwards' writings. In 2009, a classical Protestant school was founded in Nashville, TN by name and dedicated to memorializing Edwards' example of strong piety and strict academics: Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy. Edwards is remembered today as a teacher and missionary by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on March 22. The contemporary poet Susan Howe often describes Edwards manuscript compositions and notebooks held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Library Manuscripts in a number of his books of poetry and prose, including the Labadie Tract Soul Labadie Tract Soul 2007 and That It , 2010 Ã, . He notes how some Edwards notebooks are stitched from silk paper used by sisters and wives to make fans.
More recently, Edwards' text has also been studied using digital methods. Scholars from the Institute of English Studies at Jagiellonian University have applied stilometry to establish a connection of style between the various groups of Edwards' sermons. Similarly, Rob Boss of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has used visual graphics software to explore the conceptual relationship between Scripture and Nature in Edwards theology.
Progeny
The virtues of many descendants of Edwards led some scholars of the Progressive Era to see it as evidence of eugenics. After American culture, his offspring have disproportionate effects: his biographer George Marsden noted that "the Edwards family produced many pastors, thirteen high-education presidents, sixty-five professors, and many others who excel."
Maps Jonathan Edwards (theologian)
Work
Rare Books Beinecke & amp; The Library Manuscript at Yale University holds the vast majority of Edwards' surviving texts, including more than a thousand sermons, notebooks, correspondence, printed materials, and artifacts. Two Edwards manuscript sermons, a 1737 letter to Mrs. Hannah Morse, and the original minutes of the township meeting in Northampton are held by The Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
All of Edwards' corpus works, including previously unpublished works, are available online through Jonathan Edwards Center on the Yale University website. Jonathan Edwards's Work Project at Yale has issued Edwards scientific editions based on the transcription of his new manuscript since the 1950s; there are 26 volumes so far. Much of Edwards' work has been reprinted regularly. Some major works include:
- Charity and Fruit .
- Protestant Charity or Charity Duties for the Poor, Explained and Enforced. 1732. online text in Bible Bulletin Board
- The Late Dissertation God Made the World
- Contains Freedom of Will and Dissertation of Virtue, slightly modified for easier reading .
- Distinguish the Marka of the Work of the Spirit of God .
- Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Manifested to the Soul by the Spirit of God . (1734)
- Faithful Narratives of a Shocking God's Work in Conversion Many Hundreds of Souls in Northampton
- Freedom of Will
- The History of Redemption works including the Church History View
- The Life and Diaries of David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indian .
- Nature of True Virtue
- Original Sin .
- Some Thoughts on Presence in New England and That Way to Be Recognized and Promoted .
- Caring for Religion
Sermons
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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