Weeds grow really well on my garden. You can have remarkable growth by doing absolutely nothing in your garden. It's not necessarily the growth you want. It's not intentional growth. To have intentional growth, it takes some pruning, it takes some care, and it takes some work.
And you begin to see this in Edwards. You begin to see some of these characteristics develop early on in Edwards. Jonathan Edwards was an American revivalist preacher, theologian, and pastor of the Northampton Congregational Church in Massachusetts. You might know him for his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. This is the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Over the next two days, you'll get a glimpse of the man and the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. Our featured teacher is a Ligonier teaching fellow, Stephen Nichols, and his series on Jonathan Edwards is actually six messages. You can own it, along with the study guide, when you give a donation before midnight tomorrow at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800-435-4343.
He's a significant figure in church history, so take the time to learn more about Edwards.
Well, to start us off, here's Dr. Nichols on Edwards' early life. When his daughter visited, the thing that she remembered the most was the blowing of a conch shell. Esther Edwards Burr, who was the daughter of Jonathan Edwards and the wife of Erin Burr and the mother of Erin Burr Jr., who would go on to be America's third vice president, was visiting her parents in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Growing up in a pastor's home, she was used to a busy Sabbath morning, Having 10 siblings, 11 children in that family, she was used to a very busy house on Sunday mornings.
But in the 1750s, her parents had moved away from the town in which she was born. They had moved away from the church. They had moved away from the home that she was familiar with, and they were 50 miles to the west in the wilderness town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It might as well have been 500 miles, 5,000 miles to the west. This was the Howling Wilderness, an outpost there in the Berkshire Mountains as the Housatonic River snaked through and carved out a plain.
And on that plain, there were about a dozen or so roughly constructed log homes and rows of teepees, and living in those teepees and log homes were 250 or so Mohican, Mohawk, and Brotherton Indians. And there on the plain was a house, her parents' new home, and a church. And on the steps of that church, Jonathan Edwards' interpreter and also his assistant at the church would stand and would have a conch shell and would blow in that conch shell to let everybody know that it was time to show up for church. And that's what Esther Edwards Burr remembers about visiting Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This was a fascinating life, the life of Jonathan Edwards.
He spent most of it in the Connecticut River Valley, in Connecticut where he was born, and in Massachusetts in Northampton where he spent the majority of his adult life, his ministry years there at the Congregational Church at Northampton. But in the last years of his life, in the 50s, the 1750s, that is, he was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts as a missionary to the Mohicans. And yes, these are in fact the last of the Mohican of fame of James Fenmore Cooper. He also ended his life as president of Princeton University. But let's go back to the beginning.
In fact, we can divide his life up here and we'll look at his life in these segments. But we have his early years. Edward was born on October 5th, 1703. And just as an aside, that's also the day that my wife was born. And it wasn't the only criteria I was using when I was looking for my wife, but it was one of them.
So she shares the birthday with Jonathan Edwards, but 1703 to 1716, those are the early years of Edwards. And we'll see what he learned there growing up in East Windsor, Connecticut. And then as he's 12, going on to 13, he's ready for college.
So he goes off to college in 1716 to Yale. and we see him there at Yale getting his bachelor's degree, his master's degree, and staying on as a tutor or as an instructor. Then he gets the call to Northampton, and we'll look at his ministry at Northampton from 1727 to 1747. In there, of course, we have this fascinating event of the Great Awakening, 1740 to 42. We're going to take a break at that point, sort of pulled back from this run through his chronological life.
And we're going to look at one of Edward's major themes, in fact, the major theme of Edward's work in his writings. Then we'll pop back into the story and see the final years at Northampton, which were years that were just embroiled in conflict from 1747 to 1750 And then we see those final Stockbridge years as Edwards who was a scholar a professor a pastor adds missionary to his titles And then the last few months of his life, he adds the title president.
So that's the life of President Edwards. Edwards was born into the home of Timothy and Esther Stoddard Edwards. Timothy was a Harvard grad, and after he graduated from Harvard, he took this church in East Windsor, Connecticut. To sort of put this in your mind, you had essentially two settlements in Puritan, New England. You had the settlement along the coast, and of course that makes sense with Boston and New Haven, and these are sort of the settlements all the way down to New York City.
And then you had the settlement along the Connecticut River. The Connecticut River Valley, as it drops straight down through Massachusetts and Connecticut, and then veers off to the Atlantic Ocean, carved out for itself a nice plain on either side. And it was great for farming, facilitated travel, obviously the river.
So it was a nice place for settlement. And there on the Connecticut part of the Connecticut River Valley is the town of East Windsor. And that's where Edwards was born. Edwards had 10 siblings. It was a family of 11.
They all were sisters. That fact alone should preserve him a place in history, don't you think? Could you imagine growing up with 10 sisters? Edwards was just a little outnumbered. And I think he was number six maybe in the order.
So, poor Ed, could you imagine? He never could get any time at the river. I don't know.
Okay. His father pastored the church at East Windsor for 56 years. It was very typical in those days that when a person took a church, they had that church for life. People lived, were born, lived, and died, and never heard another sermon from somebody else. One pastor all their life.
Timothy's home was both typical of a minister's home and awtypical. Partly it was awtypical because of the other half of the Timothy and Esther Stoddard Edwards pair. the Esther Stoddard Edwards part. Esther, her maiden name is Stoddard, and that's what we do with these colonial women. We make their maiden name their middle name so we can keep all the Esthers and the Sarahs straight and see where they come in.
Esther was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, who was the pastor at Northampton Church, and this is going to factor significantly into Jonathan's life come 1727. And Solomon Stoddard made sure that all of his daughters were educated in a time when it was not necessarily the case that daughters would be educated. They were sent off to Boston for finishing school.
Well, at home, they were tutored in Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and they were also sent off to finishing school.
So in the household of Timothy Edwards' visitors would say, Timothy was the preacher, captivating, powerful preacher, but Esther Stoddard Edwards, she was really the brains behind the two. And all of Edwards' sisters were educated, and every one of them, all 10 of them, were sent off to finishing school at Harvard. We have an interesting insight into this home that Edwards grew up in. The first letter that we have, extent of Jonathan Edwards, is a letter that he wrote to his sister, Lucy, who was at finishing school at Boston at the time. And he writes about a revival that had just taken place in his father's church at East Windsor.
And he talks about the work of God moving people to come to accept Christ. Isn't that interesting that Edwards, who's going to come to be associated with the Great Awakening and this most remarkable revival in the history of America, in his very first letter, he's talking about revivals.
So, what we can see here is that Edwards learned a lot of positive things from this home of Timothy and Esther Edwards, But he also saw, how shall we put it, the other side of pastoral ministry. In 1705, when Edwards was just two, we have a letter from Timothy to his deacons, thanking them for his salary for the year 1705, but reminding them that he was still owed money for 1704 and 1703.
So we do have these challenges, don't we? Timothy, maybe because he wasn't getting paid by his church, had to supplement his income. And so he served as a chaplain for the British forces. These skirmishes between the Indians that were with the French and the British that is going to culminate actually in the Seven Years' War, the time that corresponds to Edwards at Stockbridge in the 1750s, prior to that Seven Years' War, there were a series of skirmishes. And these skirmishes often involved troops traveling a great distance and being involved in battles for some length of time in military campaigns.
And so they would take a minister along as chaplain for the forces. Timothy would find himself traveling through the Adirondacks of New York. And on more than one occasion, he even found himself up on the borders of Canada. And so he would write a letter home. And in his letters home, he would remind his daughters to keep young Jonathan up with his Latin studies So here were these daughters of Timothy Edwards educated themselves and teaching young Jonathan Latin This poor guy 10 sisters and they are his tutors.
He could just never escape this. In fact, one of the sisters of Edwards, Hannah, wrote a piece on the soul. And it was sort of a mocking piece of a philosopher who had argued that there is no such thing as a soul, that we are just physical beings, and that the soul is really part of our physicality and our physical makeup. It was a philosophical materialist. And so she wrote a very concise but very sharp-witted essay that sort of took the legs right out from under that view.
And for years, everybody thought it was Jonathan. They just assumed that Jonathan wrote it. And lo and behold, Hannah Edwards wrote the letter.
So this was the home he grew up in. As you can imagine, there was never a Sunday. where Edwards was not to be found in the church. And one of Edwards' biographers refers to Edwards as learning how to preach in the Connecticut River Valley School of Preaching. And his first professor in that Connecticut River Valley was Timothy.
Timothy was trained, as all the Puritans were to treat the sermon as an art form. This was a work of art. Sermons were designed to persuade, to move their audience, to take them from point A to point B. Not by means of gimmicks and tricks and theatrics, but by the power of the words, by the power of the argument, and by the power of simply standing back and letting the Word of God go forth. This was the preaching that Jonathan learned week in, week out, in addition to his Latin studies.
But as I said, Jonathan was able to see both sides to the pastoral ministry. He saw those up times of revivals and conversions and warm spirit being evident in the church, and he saw the flip side when there could be conflict and strife and politics. Edwards saw it all. And I think we do slip into this sometimes with our church history heroes, we tend to think they live these charmed lives. You know, we see a picture of Edwards and he's got his Geneva bands and his powdered wig, and he just sort of looks as if he were untouched by difficulty.
And so it is with Edwards' father. But the reality is that Edwards' father's life was one that was touched with significant challenges. In fact, while Timothy Edwards was a student at Harvard, his parents went through a divorce. That was highly unusual in that age. And the divorce was triggered because Timothy's mother likely had some sort of a mental illness and actually turned on her husband.
And Timothy, imagine this as a student at Harvard, and again, he went when he was young too, so he's just in his young teens, gets called out of Harvard, is summoned home to testify in court proceedings in his parents' divorce case.
So this is some of the background of Timothy Edwards. We do need to remember that these lives we so honor and see as having such significance weren't always just charmed existences that sort of hovered six inches above the ground and not touched by the issues and the challenges that haunt us from time to time. And in this home, I think above all, Edwards began to understand that the life that matters is the life that is lived for a singular purpose. In fact, we're going to see this. We're going to see this very early on in Edward's life, who was very much one who thought always in pen and ink.
We're going to see him writing some resolutions to try to govern his life. We use this expression today of being intentional about our lives. You know, you can have any kind of growth in your life. You can have growth in your garden. We live up in Lancaster.
The soil in Lancaster can grow just about anything. That's why farms do so well. My garden, however, is challenged. And what I found grows really well in my garden, weeds grow really well in my garden. And you can have remarkable growth by doing absolutely nothing in your garden.
But it's not necessarily the growth you want. It's not intentional growth. To have intentional growth, it takes some pruning, it takes some care, it takes some nourishing, it takes some cultivation, it takes some planning, and it takes some work. And you begin to see this in Edwards. You begin to see some of these characteristics develop early on in Edwards.
Well, as we come out of the early years of Edwards and we come to 1716, we recognize that Edwards is now ready for college as a 12-year-old going on 13. And it would be logical for Timothy to simply send him off to Harvard his alma mater But by the 1710s Harvard had already slipped into what the New England Puritans like to call latitudinarianism Now that a very long word a lot of syllables latitudinarianism And all it simply means is there was latitude on adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was the doctrine that undergirded Harvard, there was an allowance of latitude among the students and among the faculty at Harvard on the adherence to the Westminster Confession. And because of that latitudinarianism, Timothy was suspicious of Harvard. and also not too far down the river was a new college. It had just started in 1701, not as old as Harvard, and it was the College of Connecticut.
It was founded by a group of ministers. Elihu Yale was one of them. Another was John Pierpont. He's going to factor very quickly into Jonathan's life too. And they formed for the colony of Connecticut, a college that would study the arts and sciences and in obedience to God would prepare students for both public and church work.
That was the Yale charter. It was established in 1701. And so when Edwards was ready to go to college, off he goes to Yale. We'll talk more about his life at Yale. I want to talk to you about one letter that we have in particular from Edwards that he sends to his parents.
The letter talks about, and I kid you not, a food fight that had broken out at Yale. Apparently, the students were unhappy with the food. They had made numerous complaints. And when they felt like their complaints were getting answered at one particular meal, they decided they had enough and they just started throwing it around. Edwards quickly excused himself and therefore did not take part in this act of rebellion.
So that's kind of interesting. The other thing that's interesting about this letter is Edwards says, I need this book and it costs such and such. Absolutely essential that I have this book and it costs such and such. And then he says, and I must have a mathematician's compass. It is essential for my work and it costs so many pounds and so many shillings.
So there you have it, a letter that basically says, dear dad and mom, send money. I'm at college, send money. What the letter also shows us, though, is that Edwards, who's going to spend his professional life as a minister preaching the Word of God, was in fact a true Puritan. The Puritans were sometimes called people of the book because so essential and central to them was the Bible. It's very true of Edwards.
It's very true of all the other Puritans. In reality, though, there were really people of two books, because they also saw that God revealed himself in the book of nature. And so you can picture Edwards, can't you, as a young student at Yale exploring for the first time mathematics and physics. This is in the era of Newton, and Newton's books had just come to Yale, and all of a sudden, opening up before him is this whole new world of understanding of the revelation of God, and Edwards is just enjoying it and reveling in it just as much as he does in the Word of God.
So, here he is, a rather precocious 13-year-old who already has some rather interesting experiences in life and is set up now for a very fascinating life to come. A fascinating life indeed. That was Stephen Nichols on this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. As well as being a teaching fellow with us at Ligonier Ministries, Dr. Nichols serves as president of Reformation Bible College.
Students have returned, and a large number of freshmen are beginning their journey at RBC as classes officially begin today.
So please consider praying for the college and for all the young people on the campus and in the classrooms that they, like Edwards, would lead intentional lives in service to their Lord and Savior. We'll fast forward tomorrow to hear more about the life of Jonathan Edwards, but there is a lot here to study.
So if you'd like the complete six-part series on DVD, we'll send it to you when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. Along with the DVD, you'll also receive digital access to all the messages and the study guide.
So give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes and know that your support is helping take the truth of God to the nations, as well as helping to bring it into the classroom on our campus here at Reformation Bible College. Thank you. How can we summarize the ministry of Edwards? Really to answer the question, what's his big idea? That's what Stephen Nichols will tackle tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.
Thank you.
