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Jonathan Edwards may be the greatest American theologian and philosopher—and perhaps also the greatest mind—America has yet produced. Edwards’ theological genius lay in his ability to summarize effectively the main thrusts of the Reformation and Puritanism and yet not merely to reiterate these, but to apply them to crucial problems in his own century.

Edwards’ theology is rooted in Calvinism. Many of his major works are simply consistent applications of Calvin’s teaching on God’s grace and sovereignty. Edwards is undoubtedly the most powerful theologian writing in the Reformed tradition before the twentieth century.

But the sources of his thinking range far beyond Calvinism. He was influenced by various currents of thought in the seventeenth century. Some of these, like Cambridge Platonism and the philosophy of John Locke, utterly contradict one another, and seem far removed from Reformation thought. And Edwards’ theology makes considerable use of reason and natural theology. But above all else Edwards was nurtured by Puritan spiritual theology. In many ways, he is the Johann Sebastian Bach of Puritanism, perfecting and summarizing this movement’s emphasis on Christian experience at a time when it was out of fashion.

Edwards applied his theological synthesis in confronting two critical problems in the eighteenth century. One of these crises was internal: the loss of spiritual power within the Puritan renewal movement. Another crisis lay both within the church and around it: the developing climate of humanistic rationalism, the secular drift of Western culture. Edwards’ great achievement was the creation of a theology which confronted both of these crises head-on, opposing a humanist Enlightenment in society with an evangelical awakening in the church.

Edwards’ theology was forged in the flames of the Awakening. When he took over his grandfather’s congregation in Northampton, he found it in a condition of sleepwalking formalism, typical of New England’s spiritual decline. From 1650 on, the Puritan laity had been drifting away from “the power of godliness” which had characterized the first generation. They could still give correct answers to the catechism, but their hearts were fixed not on God, but on land and trade.

Edwards’ remedy for the church was aimed at a form of the same disease that was assaulting the culture: the darkening and disabling of the mind through indwelling sin. This affliction was invisible to the intellectual leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They had pinned all their hopes on the powers of human reason set free from superstition, and had thus compounded the problem by relying on the darkened mind for light.

The Puritans had applied Luther’s and Calvin’s understanding of total depravity to the religious understanding. They were dissatisfied even with Calvinist orthodoxy if it was merely “notional” in character—that is, simply the product of learning or conditioning. For the Puritans, orthodox doctrine had to be accompanied by repentance personal trust in Christ, and the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit awakening and illuminating the heart. Head and heart were expected to function together in the Spirit-led life.

Edwards’ development of Calvin’s emphasis on the work of the Spirit was simply the summation of the Puritan attack on dead orthodoxy. In stressing the need for the illumination of biblical truth by “a divine and supernatural light,” Edwards used John Locke’s philosophy of mind more as a storehouse of convenient metaphors than as a theological source. He would not have attributed the awakening impact of his sermons to any rhetoric of sensation, but to the Spirit’s penetration beneath the surface convictions of human reason to awaken “a sense of the heart” focused on the glory of the divine nature and the excellence of Christ.

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