Jonathan Edwards--The Forgotten Founding Father

If the number and popularity of recent biographies is any indication, Americans continue to be enthralled by their nation’s founding fathers, and mothers, brothers, and sisters. But while we hear much about Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and other political figures, there is hardly any mention of Jonathan Edwards, the evangelist and theologian who rivals any of his eighteenth-century British America’s contemporaries in his influence on our subsequent religious and cultural history. To be sure, college literature instructors still dutifully include excerpts of Edwards’s fire-and-brimstone sermon, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God, in their syllabi, but few recognize (and fewer point out) that this work is atypical of both his hundreds of extant sermons and his searching religious treatises. In a nation in which battles over faith now have entered the public arena as they have not for decades, however, reconsideration of Edwards’s moral example and spiritual commitment, rightly understood, could have a salutary effect on public discourse.

I do not, of course, argue for blind belief in Edwards’s Calvinist theology, as austere and demanding a faith as one can find in the Enlightenment. But one need not be a believer to appreciate the beauty and sophistication of Edwards’s religious language. Indeed, we might approach this aspect of his thought as we do that of a great poet like Milton or of a novelist like Franz Kafka, attending to his vocabulary as a metaphorical attempt to convey the eternal mysteries of God, man, and the universe. Rather, here I focus on the manner and spirit in which Edwards, an admittedly conservative man, understood and practiced his faith.

Consider, for example, his reinvigoration of Calvinism in an age whose signal thinkers were Locke and Newton. Edwards did not irrationally reject the most advanced scientific knowledge of his day but eagerly embraced it, straining his imagination to learn how it meshed with Scripture as he understood it. In this sense, Edwards was no “fundamentalist,” standing against the tide of empiricism. Instead, he joyfully swam with it, penning theological treatises whose novelty and power resided in their very modernity. He viewed the scientifically verifiable universe as a mirror to what he understood of creation, willfully fertilizing his sermons and treatises with Enlightenment ideas.

Edwards also was striking in his willingness to reexamine his most deeply held beliefs if experience so demanded. Many know, for example, that he was the British colonies’ foremost evangelical, his religious revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the mid-1730s a virtual blueprint for the subsequent massive outbreak of religious enthusiasm later termed the “Great Awakening.” But to read seriatim the several books he wrote about these events is to understand his caution in approaching others’ religious experience, and his care in holding people to the highest standards of proof for verifying it. As the revivals led, among some evangelists, to more and more extreme and disruptive behavior, Edwards distanced himself from them, eventually occupying a moderate position among the Awakening’s supporters.

Concomitantly, he condemned what he considered self-righteous “rash judging,” that is, the belief of some individuals that, having felt the work of the Spirit, they themselves now could judge the sincerity of their neighbors’ faith. Edwards maintained that finally only God knows the hearts of men and women; for humans to claim such knowledge was sheer, and sinful, presumption.

Edwards also insisted that one of the foremost signs of true religious experience was that it had its exercise and fruit in Christian practice. That is, if one’s whole life did not tend to goodness, very likely one’s heart had not been changed from selfishness to selflessness, the psychological condition incumbent upon grace. The saint’s presence in the world, in other words, should always be outer-directed. Thus, Edwards’s signal contribution to America’s religious history lay not only in his insistence on the necessity for an individual experience of conversion, but also in his belief that emotion or sentiment, as it allows us to sympathize with other peoples’ conditions, is central to this conversion, and thus to the religious life. Edwards termed this commitment disinterested benevolence, a concern for the good of all, for the common wealth. The true end for which God created man was quite simply to love, to have charity for all things, and in so doing to live in heaven on earth. All the rest—the envy, the selfishness, the contention that roils one’s life—disappeared when one followed such a religion of the heart.

The core of Edwards’s Christianity, of course, contains much that is found in other of the world’s great religious traditions, and to adhere to it, whether literally or metaphorically, could not help but make the world a better place. Why, then, have we not heard more about Edwards, either from the Right or Left? Simply put, Americans seem to want their Edwards “light” and are unwilling to engage the full demands of his faith. We acknowledge him as the nation’s premier evangelical, the progenitor of countless other revivalists from his day to ours; but we continue to se him as a curious relic of another age, preaching hell-and-damnation as the reward of the faithless in an increasingly evil world. We cut him to fit our own mold, even as we refuse to see the joy and satisfaction that accompany his commitment—what he called his “consent”—to the universe and his directive to work out one’s faith in the world.

Of course we have difficulty in facing Edwards. Plumbing his life and thought, we are forced to consider the immeasurable difference between sin and virtue, between what we say we do and how we actually comport ourselves. Undeniably, Edwards is deeply connected to this nation’s heritage, but not to the triumph of liberalism that from the nineteenth century on has enshrined the rights of individual and property as central to our identity and purpose. Rather, Edwards connects us to Governor John Winthrop’s insistence in his “Model of Christian Charity,” that to create the good society “we must be knit together in this work as one man,” or to Thoreau’s Walden, with its strident indictment of a materialist ethos.

We avoid Edwards, in other words, because he reminds us of how far we have fallen from our ideals of inclusive brotherhood and of a universe of which finally we are but small parts. He is a latter day Jeremiah come to judgment, a prophet who, in our insistent self-righteousness, our infatuation with goods rather than goodness, we avoid at our peril. If, finally, we believe that a Franklin or a Hamilton or a Jefferson has more to offer, we only add more proof to Edwards’s sense of the infinite distance between what we are and what we might be.