A philosopher, theologian, revivalist preacher, and missionary, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most brilliant, influential, and controversial figures of British colonial America and evangelical Christianity. Widely considered America’s greatest theologian, Edwards played a pivotal role in the Great Awakening, the religious revivalist movement that swept the English colonies from Maine to Georgia in the 1730s and 1740s. While Edwards’s Calvinist theology reflects the conservative New England Puritan tradition of his forefathers, his writings display the important influence of British Enlightenment thinkers, particularly the empirical philosophy of John Locke and Isaac Newton’s mechanistic physics. Edwards’s popularization of the New England revivals, his groundbreaking synthesis of Newtonian science, Lockean epistemology, and Calvinist theology, his bestselling accounts of the phenomena and proofs of spiritual conversion, his theological analyses of the Christian doctrines of redemption, grace, original sin, virtue, and human freedom, and his religious aesthetics secured for him an enduring legacy within the history of American literature and modern evangelicalism.

Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, Edwards was the only son of the Reverend Timothy Edwards, the town pastor, and Esther Stoddard Edwards, daughter of the renowned New England divine Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards was destined for the ministry from a young age; his extended family boasted influential clergymen of Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, and his maternal grandfather, whose pulpit Edwards was eventually to inherit, was popularly known as the “Pope of the Connecticut Valley” in recognition of his preeminence among the region’s clergy.