The Preacher, Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards is perhaps the best known preacher of Early America. He was born in 1703 to a Puritan minister who tutored boys for college on the side in order to support his large family. He had eleven children, but Jonathan was the only boy. His wife, Esther, was the daughter of another minister, Solomon Stoddard, and she is said to have had "unusual mental gifts and independence of character."

Jonathan was taught at home until he entered Yale College at the age of twelve, where he graduated valedictorian.  He was interested in the sciences but saw them as evidence of God's masterful hand. In 1727, he became an assistant to his grandfather, but Jonathan was a student pastor and not a visiting pastor. As a rule, he spent thirteen hours a day studying.

In the same year, he married seventeen-year-old Sarah Pierpont. Her father was the main founder of Yale, and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker. Jonathan had been impressed with Sarah's great piety and cheerful disposition. They also had eleven children.

Jonathan wrote many theological books and is considered as one of the leaders of the First Great Awakening. He's probably most famous for his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which he preached in Enfield, Connecticut in 1747. I had heard that he was not supposed to preach but the scheduled preacher didn't show up, and he was asked to fill in. However, in all my research, I could find nothing about this.

Early in 1758, he was elected the president of the College of New Jersey, later to become Princeton University. Even at that time, he was known as the most eminent American philosopher and theologian of his day. On March 22, 1758, he died of a fever incurred after being given an experimental smallpox inoculation. He was buried in the President's Lot in the cemetery of what is now Princeton beside his son-in-law, Aaron Burr. A large amount of his writings are available free online and he continues to influence Christian thought.

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