![]() ![]() Edwards’ mother and his many sisters were known for their intelligence, learning, and wit. His father, a gifted leader, had a reputation as a powerful preacher who had seen several periods of religious “stirs” in his congregation. The community and family in which Edwards grew up shaped his education, temperament, and spiritual life. The couple had 11 children: 10 daughters and one son. Timothy was the minister of Windsor Farms, where he served from 1694 to 1758. His parents were Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards. He was born on October 5, 1703, in Windsor Farms (present day South Windsor), on the east side of the Connecticut River across from Windsor. Though most of his mature life was spent in Massachusetts, Edwards was a Connecticut native. He held this position for only a few months before dying on March 22, 1758, following a bad reaction to a smallpox inoculation. ![]() In 1757 he received a call to become the president of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. Dismissed in 1750 from Northampton after a bitter, protracted controversy over qualifications for church membership, he assumed the post of missionary to Native Americans at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the following year. He became the chief theorist and apologist for revivalism and a fountainhead of the new evangelicalism. There, he participated in two major religious revivals, including the Great Awakening (a transatlantic evangelical movement that swept the British-American colonies in the 1740s). An adherent of Reformed Puritan theology, he engaged the new methods and approaches of the Enlightenment, incorporating them in innovative ways into his inherited religious worldview.Įdwards spent most of his career as a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards, arguably one of the most significant religious figures in US history, was a theologian, philosopher, pastor, revivalist, educator, and missionary. ![]()
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