Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son among eleven children of the Reverend Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards. His mother was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the powerful and long-serving pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, sometimes called the “pope of the Connecticut Valley.” A precocious child, Edwards entered Yale College at about thirteen and later returned there as a tutor after brief pastorates in New York City and Bolton, Connecticut.
In 1726 Edwards was called to Northampton to assist his aging grandfather, becoming sole pastor on Stoddard’s death in 1729. The following year he married Sarah Pierpont, and together they raised eleven children. Edwards’s preaching helped spark a local revival in Northampton in 1734–35, which he chronicled in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) — a book read across the Atlantic and often credited with helping to ignite the broader trans-Atlantic evangelical revival of the 1740s known as the Great Awakening. When the English evangelist George Whitefield toured New England in 1740, Edwards became one of the Awakening’s most influential defenders and theologians, while also warning against its excesses. His sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached at Enfield, Connecticut, in July 1741, remains one of the best-known sermons in American history.
Edwards was a rigorous defender of Reformed (Calvinist) theology and, at the same time, a serious philosophical thinker engaged with the new learning of his age — the science of Isaac Newton and the empiricism of John Locke. His major works include A Divine and Supernatural Light (1734), Religious Affections (1746), a searching study of the marks of genuine spiritual experience, Freedom of the Will (1754), a philosophical defense of Calvinist teaching on the will against Arminian objections, and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758). Two further treatises, The Nature of True Virtue and Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, were published after his death.
In 1750, after a long dispute over the qualifications required for church membership and communion — Edwards departed from his grandfather’s more open practice and insisted on a credible profession of saving faith — he was dismissed from the Northampton pulpit by a vote of his own congregation, ending a twenty-three-year pastorate. He then moved with his family to the frontier settlement of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where from 1751 to 1758 he served as a missionary pastor to the Mohican (Stockbridge) and Mohawk peoples as well as to the town’s English settlers. It was at Stockbridge, away from the demands of a large congregation, that Edwards completed much of his major philosophical and theological writing.
In 1758 Edwards was elected president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), succeeding his son-in-law Aaron Burr Sr. He arrived in Princeton in January 1758 and, within weeks, received a smallpox inoculation intended to protect the college community. Complications from the inoculation led to his death on March 22, 1758, only a few months into his presidency.
Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as colonial America’s most significant theologian and philosopher, and a formative influence on the tradition of Reformed evangelical theology in America sometimes called the “New England Theology.” His manuscripts and correspondence, running to many thousands of pages, are collected in the scholarly edition The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale University Press) and made freely available online by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.