America's fire-and-brimstone preacher wrote a childhood essay on ballooning spiders
Jonathan Edwards is remembered for Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The same mind entered Yale before turning 13, devoured Locke and Newton, studied light and optics, and at eleven wrote up how certain spiders sail through the air. For him, nature's laws were evidence of divine beauty and care.
Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, the only son among eleven children of Timothy Edwards, a minister in East Windsor, Connecticut, who tutored boys for college on the side. His mother, Esther Stoddard, was the daughter of the influential Northampton preacher Solomon Stoddard. His father and educated older sisters prepared him for Yale, which he entered in 1716. A year later he read John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and was profoundly shaped by it, filling notebooks with headings such as The Mind and Natural Science.
He did not rush into the pulpit. For eight months in 1722 and 1723 he preached at a small Presbyterian church in New York and declined its invitation to stay. From 1724 to 1726 he was one of two tutors effectively running Yale after its rector, Timothy Cutler, defected to the Anglicans. In his last college year he had a turning point: the idea that God elects some for salvation and others for damnation, which had struck him as horrible, came to seem sweet and bright.
Ordained at Northampton on February 15, 1727, as his grandfather's assistant, he held himself to thirteen hours of study a day. Stoddard died in 1729, leaving him one of the largest and richest congregations in the colony. A revival broke out there in 1733 to 1735 and spread along the Connecticut River Valley. Edwards documented the conversions with almost clinical care, but by summer 1735 the fervour had turned dark, with many people convinced they were doomed, and critics accused him of breeding fanaticism.
News of Northampton reached England and Scotland and brought him into contact with George Whitefield. In 1741, at Enfield, Connecticut, he delivered the sermon that made him famous, now a classic of early American literature. His biography of the missionary David Brainerd inspired thousands of later missionaries, and Religious Affections is still read by Calvinist evangelicals. Soon after becoming president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, he died on March 22, 1758, from a smallpox inoculation.
Source: Jonathan Edwards (theologian)
