Jonathan Edwards - Research Paper Example

Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Edwards, one of the most important philosophical theologians of America, has been famous as a philosopher as well as a missionary and is positioned among the greatest ever intellectual personalities of the nation. He was born in East Windsor on the 5th of October 1703 in a puritan evangelical family as the fifth child of Rev. Timothy, a minister and Esther Edward. Christian theology, Bible, Classics and ancient languages were the subjects of his childhood studies (Jonathan Edwards: Biography).

As a child, inquisitiveness was an observable character of Edward and he wrote two essays on the habits of flying spider and the nature of soul even at the age of ten. He was very much interested in different areas of science, ideologies and thoughts and especially in the world of philosophy (Sander-Cederlof, 1974). Edwards became very well aware of all the modern philosophical and theological issues and became familiar with the writing of John Locke and his ‘Essay concerning human understanding’ especially influenced Edward during the period of his study at Yale College.

The ideological clashes and arguments between the orthodox Calvinism and its challenging movements such as Deism, Arianism and Angilical Arminianism were included in his studies along with such ideas as British Empiricism and continental Rationalism which were originated in Europe (Jonathan Edwards: Biography). Edwards was dedicated to express his innovative ideas in front of the great personalities of the Enlightenment. He synthesized protestant theology with Newton’s physics, the third earl of Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, Locke’s psychology and Malebranche’s moral philosophy and thereby provided a recasting to Calvinism.

Metaphysics and natural philosophy were the other important areas of his interest and one could find his exclusive writings on this topics. He formulated an idealistic metaphysical system in order to challenge the Aristotelianism and he countered the anticipation of Hobbes and Descartes regarding their ideas on theoretical physics. His metaphysical theory possesses beauty as an aesthetic element in it and he considered it as an important feature of an entity (Jonathan Edwards: Biography). Jonathan Edwards as a revival preacher, philosopher and theologian has contributed much to the New English society.

As a result of the great awakening experienced during the period 1740-41, a number of new churches were built in order to occupy the new converts. But Edwards was in favor of limiting the church membership only to the truly born again and this resulted in expelling him from his own church. He expected any of the churches to call him back but it did not happen; thus, he went to a village at Massachusetts to work as a missionary and there he led a poor life for eight years and this was the period when he wrote most of his famous theological books (Sander-Cederlof, 1974).

some of his major works include ‘A Faithful Narrating of the Surprising Work of Goad’, ‘Charity and its Fruits’, Concerning the End for which God Created the World’, ‘Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God’, ‘Freedom of the Will’, ‘The Nature of True Virtue’, and ‘Original Sin’. In the year 1757 Jonathan Edwards was invited by some his followers to be the president of their newly stated college at Princeton. He arrived at Princeton in February 1758 to undertake new responsibilities and took vaccination against small pocks which was spreading over the town.

The vaccination resulted in fever and he departed on 22nd of March 1758 after a month of troubling illness. As Griffin puts in “Edward proved himself a prophet in ways no one had anticipated. The paradoxical nature of his death is somehow apt, for odd turns constantly mark the story of his life: a rise that leads to a fall, which turns out to be a blessing, which leads to a further, but reluctantly accept blessing, which proves instead a catastrophe in disguise” (Griffin, 1971, p.16). References Griffin, Edward M. (1971). Jonathan Edwards.

U of Minnesota Press. Jonathan Edwards: Biography. The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. Retrieved March 9, 2011 from: http://edwards.yale.edu/research/about-edwards/biography Sander-Cederlof, Bob. (1974). Jonathan Edwards. In Ten Christian Men from 1500 to 1800. Retrieved March 9, 2011 from: http://www.txbobsc.com/xianbios/edwards.html