FATHER, PHILOSOPHER, AND “FIREBALL” PREACHER

By: Travis W. Lewis

December 1, 2001

This essay was originally published in the December, 2001-January, 2002 issue of the bi-monthly newsletter Reveille, edited and published by Travis W. Lewis. Its original version has undergone minor edits for use on this website, https://goldenbowlpublications.net/.

Jon was born in East Windsor, Connecticut in 1703, the son of a long line of Congregationalist ministers. He entered Yale University at age 13 and graduated at 17. At age 23, he became assistant pastor of a Northampton, Massachusetts congregation at which his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was pastor. In 1729, at age 26, his church elected young Jon as their pastor, following the death of his grandfather.

During the next twenty years, Jon led a series of revivals that probably had the most profound singular effect on American religious life in all our history. During that time, however, his sermons and writings also began stirring the wrath of his entrenched Calvinist friends. As with most who gain popularity by challenging tradition with facts, Jon was attacked by radicals and conservatives alike. By the late 1740’s, he was urging his church members to exclude from participation in the Lord’s Supper any who had not had a personal religious experience with the Lord. As a result, in 1750, the congregation he had faithfully served for over twenty years dismissed him.

Mostly excluded by his lifelong denomination, Jon spent the next seven years doing mission work in an Indian settlement in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. During this final phase of his life, he wrote his major philosophical work, Freedom of Will, which discussed in great detail the doctrine of predestination. In 1758, at age fifty-five, he succumbed to death. By the time of his death, Jon and his wife Sarah had raised eleven children. According to Elisabeth D. Dodds in her book, Marriage to a Difficult Man: The Uncommon Union, by 1900, Jon’s family had over 1,400 descendants, among whom had been 13 college presidents, 65 professors, 100 attorneys, 30 judges, 66 physicians, 3 state governors, 3 senators, and a vice-president of the United States.

Though Jon left a remarkable family of learning and distinction, his legacy, however, was the mark he left on American religious life – possibly like none other, before or since. For during the 1730’s, among his other great works, God inspired this Yale graduate with a special sermon that he called, Sinners In The Hand Of An Angry God. It was possibly the most effective discourse this side of the apostolic age. He delivered it repeatedly, and with recurring results. In massive numbers, listeners would fall in place and cry for mercy as they saw themselves convicted before an angry God. Whether to a brush arbor or an open cow pasture, people flocked to his revival meetings. And many would experience not only a changed mind, but a genuinely changed way of life.

The hope born by their experience attracted others to Jon’s meetings. Being visually impaired, he would preach by reading his sermon almost verbatim with the paper within a few inches of his face. Radical changes in religious practices resulted from the meetings led by this young revivalist, the likes of which America had not seen before, nor have we experienced since. He was obviously of keen intellect and factually inclined, yet the spirit with which his messages were delivered was powerful beyond measure. No wonder the series of revivals, which Jon led, is still remembered as The Great Awakening.

As you may have already surmised, the name of this brother and revivalist of old was Jonathan Edwards.