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He was conscious that he had come to faith in an unusual way, and this concerned him. He records having doubts about his conversion because he could not fit his experience to the standard Puritan maps of the way God leads a troubled soul to salvation.

From his conversion onward, Edwards remained fascinated with the problem of how to tell whether a Christian's professed faith was truly real and saving. He contemplated the question throughout the Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, and eventually gave the subject his fullest and most influential treatment in his Treatise on the Religious Affections (1746). Why was the question of such concern to him?

First, Edwards inherited a common Puritan concern about "temporary faith." This idea, introduced by John Calvin, is a way of explaining the fact that church members sometimes fall away after years of faithful service, even though the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints ("once saved, always saved") insists that true Christians cannot fall away. The way of squaring this circle was to suggest that there is something that looks like true faith but is not—temporary faith. Thus, finding distinguishing marks of true faith becomes a necessity.

Second, Puritans responded to this problem by identifying a particular set of steps in a particular order as "the" way to salvation. Edwards disagreed with this aspect of the tradition. It fitted neither his own experience nor his pastoral observation. Thus, when he discussed how to identify true faith, he was sometimes aiming a critique at this tradition—a tradition now remote for most modern readers.

Third, in his cultural context, Edwards believed—as many still do—that fallen humanity is inherently religious. There is that within us that desires spiritual fulfillment; as Augustine put it, "thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee." However, while today unsaved "seekers" for religious satisfaction might find it in myriad fashionable religious practices, in Edwards's New England, options were limited. Such seekers likely dwelt in the margins of the church, where they might appear to be zealous Christians while actually not being Christ-centered at all. Thus the issue of genuineness confronted the pastor in unavoidable ways.

So Edwards aimed to identify "The Distinguishing Marks of the Spirit of God."

That all lay in the future, however. Meanwhile, Edwards went to the Collegiate School, a new and troubled college, later to be called Yale, to train for the ministry. After graduating, he served, from 1723 to 1726, a Presbyterian congregation in New York. Then he came back to Yale to teach. While there, he suffered serious ill health.

Some time during this period, Edwards read and was deeply influenced by Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The precise date is difficult to determine, but a story told by one of his first biographers, which had a precocious, teenaged Jonathan reading it "with great delight and profit," is almost certainly false. (It was based in part on an assumption that a philosophical notebook Edwards kept, Notes on the Mind, was written very early in his career. Recent chemical analyses of the inks used in that notebook show that the entries in fact span his adult life. We can also now trace with some exactness when copies of Locke's work arrived at Yale, which again casts doubt on the older story.)

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