JONATHAN EDWARDS: AMERICAN VISIONARY
Jonathan Edwards, meticulously studied over the past 200 years, has emerged in America as a "representative man," not in the customary sense, but because he profoundly manifested the zenith of one period and heralded a succeeding one. It is a fact that colonial figures exerted exceptional influence upon their own age, and none, except possibly William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, so completely projected the ensuing shape of a distinctly American culture, both the material and spiritual, morally secular and realistically sacred, as did Edwards. This may be due in part to the crossing of Edwards' colonial times with the constantly changing American 'present'; as a result, he has the benefit of a distinctively demonstrative status in American thought and letters.
JONATHAN EDWARDS was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, into a Puritan evangelical household. His childhood education as well as his undergraduate years (1716-1720) and graduate studies (1721-1722) at Yale College immersed him not only in the most current thought coming out of Europe, such as British empiricism and continental rationalism, but also in the debates between the orthodox Calvinism of his Puritan forebears and the more "liberal" movements that challenged it, such as Deism, Socinianism, Arianism, and especially Anglican Arminianism.
The American theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, was born in the state of Connecticut in 1703. Jonathan matriculated at Yale University from the age of thirteen. By the time of his University entrance, he had already mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He graduated from Yale at seventeen. Shortly after he was born again.
Jonathan Edwards served as the pastor of the Northampton, Massachusetts congregation from 1726 TO 1750. At the time, Northampton was the single largest and most influential church body outside of Boston. He received the pastorate from his g...