Justified True Belief

(●) The country pastor who preached America’s most famous sermon and then wrote the rules for telling a real work of God from a crowd’s excitement. + Most people who know one thing about Jonathan Edwards know the spider. In a meetinghouse at Enfield, a town that then belonged to Massachusetts and only later passed to Connecticut, on 8 July 1741, he told a congregation that God held them over the pit of hell the way a man holds a spider over a fire, and the sermon has been anthologized ever since as the sound of Puritan New England at its harshest. That is one sermon out of a working life of more than thirty years, and it is a strange keyhole to look through. The same man filled a notebook on the flight of spiders at twenty because he thought their ballooning threads were beautiful, and wrote that the reason God made anything at all was that goodness overflows. He also left behind the most sustained argument in the English language that genuine Christianity is a matter of the affections. The word is his, and it does not mean moods. An affection, as he used it, is what a person actually loves, hates, longs for and delights in: the settled leaning of a whole life rather than a feeling whipped up in a meeting. For Christian readers he matters for two reasons, and the two pull in different directions. The first is philosophical. He is among the earliest thinkers born in America whom philosophers still read, and his Freedom of the Will is a piece of hard analytic reasoning that opponents have been trying to answer for more than two and a half centuries. The second is pastoral, and it reaches a good deal further than the philosophy does. Earlier than anyone else, he faced the question that every revival and every conversion story since has raised: how do you tell the difference between the Spirit of God at work in a person and the ordinary machinery of human emotion? He answered it in a book, and the answer he gave was not what the enthusiasts wanted to hear.

(●) 1703 AD: Born in a Connecticut parsonage, the only son among eleven children. + Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, then a strip of farms along the river with a meetinghouse in the middle of it. His father Timothy was the minister there and stayed for more than sixty years, so the boy grew up watching one man do one work in one place. His mother Esther was a daughter of Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, the most powerful clergyman in the whole Connecticut Valley, a man his neighbours half seriously called the Pope of the region. Between the two of them, the ministry was less a career Jonathan chose than the air of the house. Jonathan had ten sisters and no brothers. A family story, repeated in most of the older lives, has Timothy speaking of his sixty feet of daughters, all of them unusually tall. The parsonage doubled as a school: Timothy prepared local boys for college at his own table, and his son learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew in that room alongside them, which is why a boy of twelve was ready for Yale.

(●) 1716 AD: He entered Yale at twelve, and a verse he had read all his life undid him at seventeen. + He went up to the young Connecticut college in the autumn of 1716, a month short of his thirteenth birthday, and graduated in 1720 at the head of his class. He stayed on for two years of divinity, served a small Presbyterian congregation in New York through the winter of 1722 and 1723, and came back to Yale as a tutor, which in that college meant doing most of the teaching while barely older than the students. The natural philosophy he wrote in those years still surprises people. Natural philosophy was the eighteenth century’s name for the study of the physical world, the work we would now hand to a biologist or a physicist, and the young tutor was good at it. A letter of 1723 to Judge Paul Dudley, a New Englander who corresponded with the Royal Society in London, describes how young spiders spin out a line and sail on it, and works out why the threads carry them; other papers argue about atoms, colours, and what it would even mean for nothing to exist. He was not doing devotional writing in the margins of science. He thought the two were the same study. Then came the change he spent the rest of his life trying to describe. He was reading a sentence in Paul’s first letter to Timothy, "To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." (1 Timothy 1:17), and something opened that had not been open before. No words of Scripture, he wrote afterwards, had ever seemed to him as those words did. He had known the doctrine for years. What arrived now, in his own phrase, was a new sense of it, quite different from anything he had experienced before, and he kept saying the words over to himself, and as it were singing them. Out of that came the seventy Resolutions he wrote at nineteen, with a standing note to himself at the head of them to read the whole list over once a week. The sixth of them is the whole man in one line: "Resolved, To live with all my might, while I do live."

(●) 1727 AD: Ordained at Northampton beside his famous grandfather, he married Sarah Pierpont that summer. + On 15 February 1727 he was ordained at Northampton, Massachusetts, as colleague to old Solomon Stoddard, and when Stoddard died on 11 February 1729 the whole weight of the largest church in western New England fell on a man of twenty-five. Northampton was a farming town of some two hundred families, and on the Sabbath every one of them was in the meetinghouse, which meant that whatever he said from that pulpit, the whole town heard it together and talked about it afterwards. He had been watching Sarah Pierpont, the daughter of a founder of Yale, since she was thirteen. On a blank leaf in 1723 he wrote a paragraph about her that has been quoted ever since as one of the odder love letters in American literature: they say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world, who will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her. They married on 28 July 1727, when she was seventeen, and had eleven children. Sarah ran a parsonage that was also a farm, a school, and an inn for travelling ministers, and by every account of the marriage, including his own last message from his deathbed, the union between them was the settled happiness of his life. His working habits became famous and were not entirely healthy. He was at his desk by four in the morning, spent thirteen hours a day at it, and rode out alone into the woods to think, pinning scraps of paper to his coat to mark the thoughts he wanted to keep. He came home some days looking like a man covered in leaves.

(●) 1734 AD: Revival broke out in his parish, and he wrote down carefully what he had seen. + Two sudden deaths in the town, a young man and then a young married woman, left Northampton unsettled, and Edwards preached that winter on justification by faith alone: the doctrine that God counts a sinner right with himself on the ground of what Christ has done, and not on the ground of anything the sinner has managed to become. What followed was something nobody had planned. By the spring of 1735 the town could talk about nothing else; he reckoned that more than three hundred souls had been savingly brought home to Christ in the space of half a year, in a town of about eleven hundred people, and he wrote that the place seemed to be full of the presence of God. What he did next is the reason historians keep coming back to him. A minister in the middle of a work like that would ordinarily rejoice and leave it at that. Edwards rejoiced and then wrote it up the way a man writes up an experiment: the ages, the sequence, the sober cases and the doubtful ones, all of it in a long letter to Benjamin Colman of Boston. From Boston it reached London, where it was printed in 1737, with a preface by the hymn writer Isaac Watts and his fellow minister John Guyse, as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. It became the pattern book that revivals in Britain and America measured themselves by for a century. He also recorded the part that must have cost him most. On 1 June 1735 his uncle by marriage, Joseph Hawley, a leading man of the town who had fallen into despair about his soul, cut his own throat, and the excitement in Northampton drained away almost at once. Edwards put it in the published narrative rather than leaving it out.

(●) 1741 AD: He preached at Enfield in the middle of the Great Awakening, and then spent five years putting brakes on it. + The English evangelist George Whitefield came through Northampton in October 1740 and preached four times in Edwards’ own meetinghouse; Edwards, sitting among his own people rather than standing over them, wept through the sermons. The revival that swept the colonies over the next two years is what Americans mean by the Great Awakening. On 8 July 1741 Edwards rode over to Enfield and preached the sermon everyone still knows. His text was from the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:35), which his King James Bible rendered their foot shall slide in due time. Nothing in the delivery matched the violence of the words. He read it, as he read most of his sermons, from a small manuscript held close to his face, in a level voice. A minister who was present, Stephen Williams, wrote in his diary that the moaning and crying through the whole house grew so piercing that Edwards was obliged to desist, and the sermon was never finished; only after a long wait was the congregation still enough for another minister to pray. Then came the part that is usually left out of the anthologies. Revival brought its counterfeits with it. Itinerant preachers, meaning travelling men with no parish of their own, rode into settled ministers’ towns and denounced them as unconverted, and ordinary people took to judging their neighbours’ souls by how loudly they had cried out in a meeting. On the other side stood Charles Chauncy of Boston, the ablest opponent of the whole movement, who argued that the Awakening was mostly emotional disorder. Edwards refused both sides of that quarrel, and it took him five years and three books to say why. The first, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), argued that tears, trembling and outcries prove nothing either way, for or against. The second, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742), turned on the revival’s own friends and named their errors. The third, Religious Affections (1746), set out twelve signs by which a person may test whether what has happened to them is grace, ending with the plainest of them, the way they live afterwards. One detail makes the whole controversy personal. Sarah’s own intense experiences during the revival are described at length in Some Thoughts, without her name, as his prime example of what he was defending. He was arguing about religious experience with the closest possible evidence in his own house.

(●) 1750 AD: His own congregation voted him out, with only twenty-three of some two hundred and thirty men standing by him. + Two things broke the twenty-three-year pastorate. The first was an ugly business in 1744, when it came out that a group of young men in the town had been passing around a midwife’s manual and using it to bait the young women. Edwards read out from the pulpit a list of the young people he wanted to see, those under suspicion and those called only as witnesses together, so that to the town the whole list looked like a list of the guilty. Several of the leading families had a name on it, and they never quite forgave him. The second was communion, and it was the one that finished him. Solomon Stoddard had opened the Lord’s Supper to anyone of decent life and sound doctrine, converted or not, on the view that the sacrament itself might convert them, and for twenty years his grandson followed the practice he had inherited. By the late 1740s Edwards had concluded it was wrong. The table, he now held, belongs to those who can make a credible profession of real faith, meaning those able to say honestly, and in a way their neighbours could believe, that they had come to trust Christ. He said so in print in 1749. Asking a New England town to accept that half of it had been coming to the table on false terms was, in practice, asking for his dismissal. The end came quickly, and by the narrowest margin anyone could have devised. A council of neighbouring churches sat from 19 June 1750, decided for his dismissal on 22 June by a majority of one, and the church concurred the same day. Of about two hundred and thirty male members, only some twenty-three appeared for him, and the rest either voted him out or stayed away. He preached his farewell sermon on 1 July, telling the people who had just removed him that pastor and flock would meet again before the judgment seat, where everything would at last be known. Then, because the town could not find a replacement, he went on supplying that same pulpit for months, standing up Sunday after Sunday to preach to a congregation that had voted him out.

(●) 1751 AD: Exile on the frontier gave him his greatest books, and Princeton had him for five weeks before a smallpox inoculation killed him. + On 8 August 1751 he was installed at Stockbridge, a mission settlement in the Berkshire hills, as pastor to a few English families and missionary to the Housatonic Mohicans, with a boarding school for Mohawk boys attached. He preached through an interpreter, in short plain sermons quite unlike the ones he had preached at Northampton, and he spent a good deal of ink defending the mission’s funds against the local family that had been running them. War parties came near enough that the parsonage was fortified. It was also the most productive stretch of his life, which is not what anyone would have predicted for a dismissed minister in a fortified house on the edge of a war. In six years on the frontier he wrote Freedom of the Will (1754), the book that made his reputation in Britain; The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended; and the two dissertations, on the end for which God created the world and on the nature of true virtue. In September 1757 his son-in-law Aaron Burr died, and the trustees of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, asked Edwards to take the presidency. He told them plainly that he was an awkward speaker in company, that his health was poor, and that he had a history of the whole work of redemption that he still meant to write. He went anyway, and was installed as president on 16 February 1758. Smallpox was in the town, so on 23 February he was inoculated by a Philadelphia physician, William Shippen. Inoculation in that century meant being given a small dose of the live disease on purpose, in the hope of a mild case and lasting protection afterwards. It was a real if calculated risk, and most people who took it came through. Edwards did not. The inoculation took badly, and pustules closed his throat so that he could not swallow the medicine for the fever. He died on 22 March 1758, aged fifty-four, having been president for about five weeks. Samuel Hopkins, gathering the account from those who were in the room, records his last words, spoken to friends at the bedside who thought he was past hearing: "Trust in God, and ye need not fear."

What He Taught

(T1) God made the world because fullness overflows, and the creature’s joy is part of the overflow. + Ask most people why God would create anything and you get an answer about need or loneliness. Edwards thought the question had a better answer, and he worked it out in a dissertation on the end for which God created the world. Start with a spring on a hillside. It does not pour out water because it is short of water; it pours because it is full, and everything downhill of it lives off the overflow. That is Edwards’ picture of God. The fullness in question is God’s own knowledge, holiness and happiness, and creation is that fullness communicated outward: creatures who come to know God, love God, and rejoice in God. Theologians call the outward movement emanation, simply a flowing out, and Edwards added a second word for the return trip, remanation, the flowing back. What comes from God goes back to God in the creature’s knowing and praising, which is why Paul can say that from him and through him and to him are all things (Romans 11:36). The pastoral edge of this is sharp. If God’s glory and your happiness were two separate goals, God would have to choose between them, and you would always suspect he had chosen his own. Edwards denies the division outright: the glory of God is displayed precisely in creatures made happy in him, so that seeking your deepest joy and seeking his glory are one motion, not two. The paired dissertation, on true virtue, presses the same point from the other side. Real virtue, he argues, is not tidy behaviour or even benevolence to your own circle. It is love to being in general, and that phrase is worth slowing down over. Being in general means everything that actually exists, taken together and not carved up into the part that belongs to you and the part that does not, so a love aimed at being in general has to begin with love to God, since he is most of what there is. A patriotism that stops at the town line is not virtue but a smaller loyalty wearing its clothes.

(Q) "Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair." + Source: A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, chapter II, section VII (Hickman edition of the Works, 1834). Refulgence is an old word for radiance, the shining of a light source; the luminary is the light itself. Edwards has just argued that the knowledge, love and joy God communicates to creatures are not gifts merely handed over but God’s own fullness taking a created form, so that when a creature knows and loves and rejoices in God, the light has come home (T1).

(T2) Saving knowledge of God is a new sense of the heart, not simply a new opinion in the head. + In the summer of 1733 Edwards preached a sermon, printed the next year, on the words Jesus spoke to Peter, that "flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 16:17), and it contains his single most characteristic idea. He asks you to consider honey. A man who has read a description of honey can tell you accurately that it is sweet; he holds a correct opinion and can defend it in argument. A man who has tasted honey knows something the first man does not, and no amount of further description will supply it. Edwards says the difference between those two men is the difference between knowing about God and knowing God. The unconverted man may hold every article of the creed and be able to prove them; what he lacks is a taste for the beauty of the God he is describing. Edwards calls the missing thing a sense of the heart, and he is careful about what he is not saying: it is not a voice, not a vision, not a new revelation added to Scripture, and it never tells anyone anything the Bible does not already say. It is the same doctrine, seen as lovely rather than merely granted as true. That is why he insists the change has to be given rather than achieved. Paul says the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God and is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14), which Edwards reads as a statement about taste rather than intelligence. You can argue a man into agreement. You cannot argue him into finding something beautiful. This teaching is the seed of everything else in him: it is why the affections matter (T3), and why he thought the sinner’s problem lay in what he wants rather than in what he can do (T5).

(Q) "Thus there is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness." + Source: A Divine and Supernatural Light (preached 1733, printed 1734), under the first head of the doctrine (Hickman edition of the Works, 1834). He has just distinguished two kinds of knowledge of good: the merely notional, in which a person judges that something is what people call excellent, and the kind that consists in the sense of the heart, in which the mind is actually pleased by what it sees. The honey follows immediately, and the sermon adds a third case: you can be told a face is beautiful, but only seeing it gives you the sense of the beauty (T2).

(T3) True religion consists largely in holy affections, and the surest test of them is how a person then lives. + By 1746 Edwards had watched a revival rise, sour, and be argued about for a decade, and Religious Affections is his verdict. The word affections needs teaching, because it does not mean what feelings means now. An affection, for Edwards, is a vigorous exercise of the will: what you actually love, hate, long for, fear and delight in, the settled leaning of a person rather than a mood that passes. Love of money is an affection. A shiver during a hymn is not. His argument runs on two tracks at once, and the second is what makes the book last. On the first track he answers Charles Chauncy and the sober party, the settled ministers who wanted religion kept quiet and reasonable, and against them he insists that religion without affection is not religion at all, since nobody was ever saved by an opinion he could take or leave. On the second track he turns to the revival’s own enthusiasts, and enthusiasm in that century was not a compliment: it meant taking your own strong impressions for the voice of God. Against them he takes twelve popular proofs of grace and shows that every one of them proves nothing. Great intensity proves nothing. Texts of Scripture arriving suddenly in the mind prove nothing. Fluent talk about religion, long hours spent in praise, even a settled confidence of one’s own salvation: none of them settle the question, and Edwards works through each case with the calm of a man who has seen the counterfeits at close range. Then, having cleared the ground, he gives twelve real signs, and weights the last one heaviest: Christian practice, meaning a whole life visibly turned in a new direction and kept there under pressure. It is the pastor’s application of a rule Jesus gave, "Thus you will recognize them by their fruits." (Matthew 7:20). Edwards is honest that the test takes time, which is the one thing a revival meeting cannot give you.

(Q) "Hence the proposition or doctrine, that I would raise from these words is this, true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections." + Source: A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), part I, section I (Hickman edition of the Works, 1834). The words he is preaching from are Peter’s description of Christians under persecution: "Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory," (1 Peter 1:8). Edwards notices that when their religion was under its hardest trial, what showed was love and joy, and he builds the whole treatise on that observation (T3).

(T4) Nothing keeps an unconverted sinner out of hell for a single moment except the mere pleasure of God. + This is the doctrine of the Enfield sermon, and Edwards states it in one line: there is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God. By mere pleasure he means God’s sovereign will, held back by no obligation and no difficulty. The sermon then spends an hour showing that every ordinary security a person leans on is thinner than it looks. Health is no guarantee, since the healthy die daily. Prudence is no guarantee either, since the prudent are not exempt from the accidents that carry other people off. And sincere religious effort, which is the thing a New England congregation would have leaned on hardest, is no guarantee at all, because God has promised nothing to a man outside of Christ. The images are what people remember, and they are chosen with a scientist’s care: a spider held over a flame, a spider’s web trying to stop a falling rock, waters dammed and rising, a bow already bent with the arrow on the string. What almost nobody quotes is the last movement of the sermon, which is an invitation. The door of mercy stands wide open, Christ has flung it open, and many are pressing in that very day, which is the only reason for describing the danger at all. Edwards was not enjoying the terror. On his own account, a preacher who believes the danger is real and says nothing is the cruel one. Christians have disagreed about the sermon ever since, and the disagreement is worth stating fairly. Some judge that it presses the fear of God past what a congregation can bear and past the Bible’s own proportions; others answer that Jesus himself warned about hell more often than anyone else in Scripture, and that softening the warning is not kindness. What is not in dispute is that Edwards thought the danger was true, and preached it because he thought so.

(Q) "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight." + Source: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield on 8 July 1741, application (Hickman edition of the Works, 1834). The image was not invented for the occasion. Edwards had watched spiders for years and had written admiringly about them at twenty; here the creature at the end of the thread becomes the hearer, and the thread is the patience of God (T4). The sermon closes by urging everyone in the meetinghouse to come out of that condition while the door is open.

(T5) A sinner’s inability to come to God is an unwillingness, not a disability, and that is why he is still to blame. + Here is the objection Edwards set out to answer, and it is a fair one. If God governs everything, and a man’s choices follow from what he is, then how can anyone be blamed for anything? Nobody chooses his own character. The book he wrote about it, Freedom of the Will (1754), is the most technical thing he published and the one philosophers still argue with. He begins by refusing to let the word freedom float. In common speech, he says, liberty means the power or opportunity anyone has to do as he pleases, and by that definition human beings plainly are free: nothing stops you doing what you want. What his opponents wanted was something further, a will that is free from itself, undetermined by any motive at all, so that at the last instant the choice could go either way for no reason whatever. Edwards’ reply is that this is not freedom but randomness, and randomness cannot be praised or blamed either. If your hand went up because a coin somewhere inside you came down heads, nobody would thank you for raising it. A choice with no reason behind it is not more mine. It is less. Then comes the distinction that made the rest of his theology preachable, and it is worth learning the two terms. Natural inability is when you cannot do a thing even if you want to: the prisoner who cannot walk out through a locked door, the man who cannot lift a car. Moral inability is when the only thing stopping you is what you want: the loving mother who could not be paid to smother her child, the loyal friend who could not be induced to betray. Nobody thinks the mother is imprisoned. Edwards says the sinner’s trouble is entirely of the second kind. He has hands, mind, time and opportunity; what he lacks is the inclination, and an unwillingness is exactly the thing a person is blamed for. So the preacher can command everyone in the room to repent without absurdity, and the same person’s new willingness, when it comes, is God’s gift rather than his own achievement (T2). Plenty of Christians reject the Calvinism this serves, with its teaching that God chooses whom he will save rather than waiting to see who will choose him. They have still had to answer this book, and they know it.

(Q) "Moral Inability consists not in any of these things; but either in the want of inclination; or the strength of a contrary inclination; or the want of sufficient motives in view, to induce and excite the act of the Will, or the strength of apparent motives to the contrary." + Source: Freedom of the Will, part I, section IV (Hickman edition of the Works, 1834). Want here carries its older sense of lack. The things he has just ruled out are the marks of natural inability: a defect of understanding, a bodily incapacity, or an obstacle outside the will. His own examples of moral inability follow at once and are deliberately ordinary, including a child of great love and duty to his parents who is simply unable to kill his father (T5).

(Q) "The appearance of every thing was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every thing. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the sun, and moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature." + Source: Personal Narrative, written about 1740, first printed in Samuel Hopkins’ life of 1765 and carried in Sereno Dwight’s memoir (Hickman edition of the Works, 1834). Looking back on the year after his conversion, Edwards describes what the new sense of the heart actually did to him, and the answer is that the world looked different. He goes on to say that thunderstorms, which had terrified him as a boy, now delighted him, so that he would go out to watch the lightning and sing to himself. The man who wrote the Enfield sermon spent most of his writing life on this instead, and it is the side of him his heirs went back to.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave the evangelical revival both its defence and its brakes, and even his opponents printed him. + The clearest measure of his reception is John Wesley. Wesley was an Arminian, meaning he held that saving grace can be resisted and that Christ died for all alike, which is close to the opposite of Edwards’ Calvinism on the points where they disagreed. He read A Faithful Narrative on 9 October 1738, walking from London to Oxford, and could not put it down. He went on to print abridged versions of Edwards for his own preachers, quietly editing out the Calvinism and keeping everything about the marks of a true work of God. Two men who would have argued all night about predestination agreed about how to tell conversion from excitement. That is the shape of Edwards’ influence generally. Revivals are always attended by two kinds of critic, the one who says the whole thing is hysteria and the one who says any amount of hysteria is fine if souls are saved, and Edwards handed the church a third position with tests attached. His Life of David Brainerd (1749), the edited diary of a young missionary who died in his house at twenty-nine, did something similar for missions: William Carey in India and Henry Martyn in India and Persia both read it and were marked by it, and it stayed in missionary knapsacks for a century and a half.

(†) His students built the first school of theology America produced. + Young ministers had boarded in the Edwards parsonage to read divinity with him, and after his death they carried his ideas forward under the name of the New Divinity: Samuel Hopkins, who wrote the first life of him in 1765, and Joseph Bellamy, whose True Religion Delineated Edwards himself introduced. Their pupils in turn manned the pulpits of New England and the frontier during the revivals of the early nineteenth century, and his grandson Timothy Dwight presided over Yale in the middle of them. Two consequences are worth naming. The first is that the Edwardsean line took his account of true virtue, a disinterested love to being in general, meaning a love that plays no favourites and looks for no return, and turned it against the slave trade. Hopkins in Newport, the busiest slaving port in New England, preached against the traffic and against slaveholding, and Edwards’ son Jonathan Edwards the younger argued the case publicly in 1791. That development, built on ground his teacher had laid, ran directly against his teacher’s own practice. The second consequence is stranger. His heirs found Freedom of the Will hard to preach, since a congregation told that every choice follows necessarily from what a person already is will ask what is left of the invitation. The long attempt to keep his God while softening his determinism produced most of the theological argument in nineteenth-century America.

(†) The twentieth century rediscovered him twice: once as a philosopher, once as a pastor. + For a long stretch Edwards was a schoolroom caricature, the hellfire preacher in an anthology of American literature. The historian Perry Miller, who was not a believer, put an end to that with a study in 1949 that treated him as a first-rate mind, and the Yale critical edition of the works followed, twenty-six volumes between 1957 and 2008, with a further forty-seven volumes of transcribed manuscripts now online. George Marsden’s biography of 2003 did for the life what Miller had done for the thought. At the same time he came back into the churches from an unexpected direction. The two dissertations, and particularly the claim that God’s glory and human joy are one thing rather than two (T1), became the backbone of what John Piper named Christian hedonism, and through him and others a body of eighteenth-century New England theology ended up being preached to congregations that had never heard of the New Divinity. The sermon everyone knows is a page and a half. The books being read now are the ones he wrote in a fortified parsonage on the frontier after his church threw him out.

(†) Where his own record will not bear defending: he bought and held slaves, and he handled his people badly more than once. + The evidence for all three of these is his own, drawn from his own papers and his own conduct rather than from anything later readers made of him. - Slaveholding. A bill of sale survives, dated June 1731, in which Edwards, having travelled to Newport in Rhode Island, bought from a slave ship’s master a girl of about fourteen named Venus for eighty pounds. His salary was about two hundred pounds a year, so she cost him close to five months of everything he earned. He cut the document into four pieces later and wrote sermon notes on the backs, which is the only reason it survived at all. He held enslaved people in his household for the rest of his life, and the inventory of his estate in 1758 listed a boy named Titus at thirty pounds. The record does not stop there. In an unpublished draft letter of about 1741, written for a council of ministers, he defended a neighbouring minister, Benjamin Doolittle of Northfield, whose own parishioners had charged him with a string of faults including owning a slave; the draft condemns the cruelty of the Atlantic slave trade out of Scripture while defending the ownership itself. He preached that true virtue is good will to being in general and admitted African members to his church, and he still held human beings as property. Both belong in the same ledger, and the second is not excused by the first. - The affair of 1744. Reading out the town’s young people from the pulpit, those under suspicion and those wanted only as witnesses in one undivided list, was a failure of ordinary pastoral care, and biographers sympathetic to him say so plainly. It cost him the confidence of the people he had spent a decade shepherding. - The manner of the communion change. Christians have divided ever since over whether he was right about the Lord’s Supper, and the case he made in 1749 is a serious one. The complaint is about method rather than doctrine: he announced a reversal of a settled practice, in print, to a congregation he had let assume otherwise for twenty years, and then declined to explain himself from the pulpit until the quarrel was past mending. A man who had written a book on how easily religious people deceive themselves was slow to see how his own certainty looked from a pew.