Jonathan Edwards's Puritan Ideas & Beliefs

I. Liberal Innovations made by Solomon (Samuel) Stoddard (Edwards' Grandfather)

1. Stopped the requirement that church members profess an experience of saving grace.

2. Accepted intellectual will to believe and assumption of Christian duties.

3. Opened the Lord’s Supper to everybody, arguing that the sacrament need not be reserved as a seal of faith for the believers, but might very well be a means of converting to belief.

4. Believed that salvation rested on individual moral effort as well as on grace; stressed morality rather than piety.

II. Leader of the Great Awakening

Jonathan Edwards is considered the leader of The Great Awakening in New England. It is a name given to a religious revival in 1730s which brought about the following changes in the Puritan theology:

1. Stressed the emotional side of religion.

2. This weakened institutional authority; regeneration was not certified by church, but by one’s own emotional conviction.

3. It bypassed doctrinal orthodoxy; the convert’s immediate sense of participating in spiritual reality rendered intellectual formulations less significant.

4. It made religion more popular; it is easier to experience emotional excitement than rational understanding.

5. It made religion more democratic; by emphasizing the individual experience of conversion, and the equal capacity of everyone, child or adult, rich or poor, ignorant or wise, to be touched by the inner experience of grace.

6. It made religion trans-colonial; breakdown of distinctions between church and creed, it encouraged the proliferation of sects which led to vagueness in doctrine, laxness in discipline, and faded into general religious indifference. It gave rise to a community organized in pursuit of secular values.

III. Aspects of Edwards' Religious Philosophy

1. His mystical conversion at age seventeen - "I often used to sit and view the Moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold glory of God in these things; in the meantime, singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer." from "Personal Narrative."

2. He agreed with John Locke in the concept that ideas are generated by sense impressions - knowledge must be supplemented by faith.

3. He believed in the intuitive process; a person must passively surrender to receive grace through senses. One cannot achieve saving grace through a rational process.

4. From Isaac Newton, Edwards borrowed the concept that the harmonious working of the universe reflected the magnificence of "the Great Geometrician" or God.

On The Quiz Be Prepared For Questions Such As The Ones Above As Well As

True/False & Biography

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