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Edwards influenced a large circle of serious Christian readers by his work as editor and publisher of the diary of David Brainerd. As a grieving friend and would-be father-in-law, Edwards found in the late missionary's diary a perfect instance of what he had taught about the ideal Christian life. Editing a bit to cut out Brainerd's occasional lapses into despair, Edwards produced a work that has never been out of print. It was read with deep appreciation by leaders of domestic evangelism (like the Methodist Francis Asbury), domestic reform (the Baptist Francis Wayland), and missionary service (Samuel J. Mills, Adoniram Judson, Mary Lyon, A. J. Gordon). The work's great appeal remains its living testimony to what Samuel Hopkins styled "disinterested benevolence" in Brainerd's missionary labors among Native Americans.

Edwards's important revival writings were published first in England, where they attracted considerable interest among Calvinist and evangelical believers. When, in the 1770s, the Baptist Andrew Fuller read Edwards on the will, he found a way to affirm both inherited Calvinism and a new evangelistic urgency. The key was Edwards's distinction between natural human ability (unimpaired by the fall) and moral human ability (damaged so as to require the quickening work of the Spirit). Edwards's influence on Fuller and others helped launch William Carey as the pioneer English missionary to India and his age's chief spokesman for foreign missionary service.

As early as the late 1730s, Edwards was corresponding with a circle of ministers in Scottish towns that later experienced revivals. These included William McCulloch of Cambuslang and James Robe of Kilsyth. Younger ministers like John Erskine soon joined in promoting Edwards's ideas. Edwards was praised as a subtle metaphysician by leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Henry Home, Lord Kames, and Dugald Stewart, the major force behind the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thomas Chalmers, the leader of Scottish evangelicalism in the early nineteenth century, testified that Edwards's Freedom of Will played a key role in his own conversion. John McLeod Campbell (on the nature of Christ's work) and James Edwin Orr (on the comprehensive sovereignty of God over all of life), two of nineteenth-century Scotland's most creative theologians, also paid tribute to Edwards's influence.

Mid-state Presbyterians always thought New England Congregationalists were too enamored with metaphysics. But despite that opinion, they also held Edwards in highest regard. To the first professor of Princeton Seminary, Archibald Alexander, Edwards was an honored predecessor as theological evangelist. To later Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and Lyman Atwater, Edwards represented the triumph of historic Calvinism over idle philosophy (a victory they thought Edwards's New England successors had forfeited in modifying his theology). To Henry Boynton Smith, who in the mid-nineteenth century advocated a more romantic, Christ-centered theology, Edwards represented the best kind of theologian, since he was able to reason subtly while maintaining his humble trust in God's sovereign wisdom and in the saving power of the Holy Spirit.

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