Jonathan Edwards has been called "one of America's original minds" (Hatch and Stout 3) and probably the leading theologian in the movement known as the Great Awakening. Edwards wrote extensively on the subject of theology and used his personal experience as a source for the concepts he examined. He demonstrates the awakening of Christian thought in works such as his "Personal Narrative" using the language of sensory experience, which might seem contradictory but which was very effective in Edwards' hands. An examination of the language he uses and the manner in which he expresses his devotion will show how he relates theology and sensory experience.
Edwards was a student of Locke and Newton and was himself a figure in the Enlightenment, but he also criticized that movement and sought to rectify what he considered important in it with his view of a Christian God. Underlying Edwards' thought is a conception of reason derived from Locke and others and colored by Edwards' own experience. Religion was a vital element in Edwards' life perhaps from the beginning, and the decisive period seems to have been during his last years of study at Yale, and his religious thought seems to have arrived fully developed:
So far as the available evidence tells us, there never was a religiously aware Jonathan Edwards whose piety was of a different sort than that which carried his life's work. Edwards' religion was from its root--with or without what he would have called conversion and with or without Newton and Locke--a sheer adoration of God's majesty, and that is for Edwards to day, a sheer beholding of God's beauty (Jenson 15).
Central to Edwards' theology is his equation of holiness with beauty, and beauty is in turn interpreted as the harmonious reconciliation of opposites. A second motif in his work is the concept by which he grasps the relation between God's beauty, the beauty of the soul and the beauty of nature, and this concept is ...