Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, the son of a Congregationalist minister and the grandson of the formidable Solomon Stoddard. He entered Yale College at the age of thirteen, graduated in 1720, and after a brief pastorate in New York returned to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he would serve as minister for more than two decades. In 1758, having recently accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey, he died of a smallpox inoculation just weeks after taking up the post.
Edwards ministered during a period of religious uncertainty in colonial New England, when Enlightenment rationalism was beginning to press against inherited Calvinist orthodoxy. His own temperament was shaped by both currents: he read Locke and Newton with genuine enthusiasm, yet remained anchored in the theology of the Westminster Standards and the thought of Reformed divines. When waves of revival swept through the Connecticut River Valley in the 1730s and 1740s — the movement that came to be called the Great Awakening — Edwards stood at its center, preaching with careful precision and defending, with equal care, the legitimacy of religious affections against both enthusiasts who trusted every emotion and rationalists who trusted none.
His theological writing gave the awakening its most serious intellectual account. Works such as *A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections* and *The Freedom of the Will* attempted to hold together genuine piety and rigorous Reformed doctrine, arguing that true religion transforms the whole person and that human moral agency is compatible with divine sovereignty. His sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" remains widely known, though it represents only one register of a body of work far more expansive and tender than that single text suggests.
Edwards left behind a tradition of Reformed theology in America that continued through his students and became known as the New England Theology, shaping evangelical thought well into the nineteenth century.