Edwards is not simply a towering intellect or a piercing theologian, he is a pastor concerned for his people, a father encouraging his children, a husband delighting in his wife, and a man battling to live by faith in God through seasons of intense joy mingled with deep sorrow. Marsden helps us see the three-dimensional Edwards…I enjoyed A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. If you are new to Edwards, it is an excellent doorway into his life and work. If you are a long-time lover of Edwards, you will still find much to learn and enjoy in Marsden’s short biography.

I became familiar with the name Jonathan Edwards in my twenties. My knowledge of Edwards, however, was mostly indirect. He influenced my influences – men like John Piper and Tim Keller – but I did not spent much time with Edwards himself. I was grateful that as part of a class on Edwards this past summer, I got to read a helpful introduction to his life in George Marsden’s A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards.

Having previously written a substantial biography of Edwards, Marsden is well-suited to tell Edwards’s story for a general audience. Edwards, he writes, is a “remarkable figure” in American history and one of the most important “Americans in the history of Christianity” (p. ix). Edwards was also a fascinating and ferociously devout Christian. Marsden says, “He was a passionate visionary, a world class intellectual, and an intense aesthetic who lived in a very real world of a large energetic family and a volatile and often contentious village” (p.87). Marsden aims to make Edwards accessible to a general audience. I think he succeeds.

Edwards in His Time

The first three chapters situate Edwards in his time, the early eighteenth century, noting the scientific and philosophical shifts leading up to the American Revolution. Edwards was in the thick of this cultural energy as a student at Yale and throughout his pastoral ministry. In these early chapters, Marsden contrasts Edwards with Benjamin Franklin. Although they never met, Franklin is a fitting contrast as he and Edwards are remarkably similar yet significantly different (p. 3). Both were shaped by the imaginations of their time, sharing a love of new scientific discoveries in the study of the natural world. However, they diverged greatly in their responses to the growing tension between “British modernity and New England’s earlier Puritan heritage” (p.2). Franklin sang the siren song of the enlightenment, fashioning himself as a “self-made man,” while Edwards aimed for complete trust in a sovereign God (pp. 8-9 & 23). Franklin’s pragmatic outlook on life was shackled by the limits of the natural world and human reason. Edwards, however, saw a personal creator God at the center of the universe. For Edwards, the world was “a personal communication from God” (p. 21). When others were captive to Enlightenment progress, Edwards was held by the beauty of God in Christ. This contrast shapes Marsden’s account of Edwards’ life.

The Ups and Downs of Revival

After a short stint in pastoral ministry followed by time as a tutor at Yale, Edwards succeeded his grandfather Soloman Stoddard, as pastor of the Northampton church. There, he pastored through two waves of revival. First, a local revival in 1734-1735. Marsden notes how Edwards’ preaching, the shocking death of a young man and the sudden conversion of a promiscuous woman sparked this wave of spiritual awakening (pp. 45-48). Then, in the 1740’s, Edwards pastored through the first Great Awakening in America (pp. 61-68). Through his writing and preaching Edwards was an important catalyst and interpreter for both revivals. His sermons had, Marsden says, a piercing logic and spiritual intensity “that sometimes cast a spell over his listeners” (p. 66). Edwards defended revival as a work of God while also being one of the most insightful critics of its excesses and false imitations. He provided a clarity that helped discern God’s work of true revival from Satan’s deceptive and destructive parodies of it.

Marsden shows the ups and downs Edwards experienced in both revivals. Edwards saw the Holy Spirit’s work up close, but he also saw spiritual opposition. As Marsden says, “when there was a mighty work of God, Satan… would furiously strike back” (p. 49). In some of his most moving pages, Marsden speaks of the saddening means by which Satan struck at the Northampton revival, notably through Joseph Hawley’s suicide in June 1735. Here readers meet Edwards, not as a detached observer evaluating these revivals but a pastor, husband, father, and friend living and fighting in the thick of it all.

In chapter six Marsden zooms in on Edwards’ home. Readers get a glimpse of the warmth of Edwards’ love and admiration for his wife Sarah. While some saw marriage as a distraction from the things of God, Marsden quotes Edwards’ high praise for Sarah, “If this be distraction… I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatificial, glorious distraction!” (p. 85) All eleven of the Edwards children survived infancy, which was rare in those days.

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