Jonathan Edwards was a great influence on the Great Awakening. Why was he voted out of the pulpit in Northampton?

Jonathan Edwards was a prominent leader of the east-coast revivals of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening.  The Great Awakening defined Christianity in the New World as distinctive from its European forms and allowed it to adapt to a democratic society.  Edwards was known as one of the greatest and most profound American evangelical theologians.  Edwards explicated the fundamentals of Reformed Calvinism according to reason and common sense, relying minimally on arguments from the Bible.  Edwards has been described as the first and greatest homegrown American philosopher [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jonathan_Edwards].

Edwards was raised in a theological environment.  His father was Timothy Edwards, a minister, and his grandfather was Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Massachusetts.  Jonathan Edwards had been an eager seeker after salvation and was not fully satisfied with his own "conversion".  He took greater joy in the beauties of nature, and delighted in the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon.  Edwards sought the soul of a true Christian, a holiness that was a sweet, serene, and calm nature.  Balancing these mystic joys and perceptions of Christian community was the stern tone of his Resolutions.  Edwards reflects the core Calvinist spirituality, that the more we appreciate the glory of God, the more we perceive the depravity and evil of the human rejection of Him [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/].

On February 5, 1727 he was ordained minister at Northampton, Massachusetts and assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard.  Stoddard launched innovations in order to bring the people of the frontier to church, including opening communion to all who would come.  In this way, he utilized the Communion Table as a converting ordinance and not as a reward or sealing of salvation.  Stoddard departed from the traditional Puritan dry discourses to reach the emotions of his congregation.  As his successor, Edwards would develop this method of preaching and provide theological underpinnings for it in his work on the religious affections.  Edwards rejected his grandfather's opening of the Communion Table, an act that would undermine his position with the congregation decades later [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jonathan_Edwards].

Solomon Stoddard died in 1729, leaving Edwards the difficult task of the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony.  In 1733, a religious revival began in Northampton and reached such intensity in the winter of 1734 and the following spring as to threaten the business of the town.  In six months, nearly 300 were admitted to the church.  The revival gave Edwards an opportunity for studying the process of conversion in all its phases and varieties.  This revival in Northampton was followed in 1739-1740 by the Great Awakening, distinctively under the leadership of Edwards (Tracy).

Edwards' ideas were compatible with scientific developments in his age.  He was fascinated by the discoveries of Isaac Newton and other scientists of his time.  While he was worried about the excessive faith in reason and materialism of some of his contemporaries, he saw the laws of science as derived from God.  For him there was no conflict between the spiritual and material worlds.  Edwards became very well known as a revivalist preacher who subscribed to an experiential interpretation of Reformed theology that emphasized the sovereignty of God, the depravity of humankind, the reality of hell, and the necessity of "New Birth" conversion.  The intellectual framework for revivalism he constructed in many of his works pioneered a new psychology and philosophy of affections, later invoked by William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 [http://edwards.yale.edu/research/about-edwards/biography].

In 1748, a crisis developed in his relations with his congregation.  Edwards' preaching became unpopular.  For four years, no candidate was presented for admission to the church.  Edwards was not allowed to discuss his views in the pulpit.  Edwards was concerned with the "open admission" policies instituted by Stoddard that allowed many hypocrites and unbelievers into church membership.  Edwards insisted on a public profession of saving faith based on the candidate's religious experiences as a qualification not only for Holy Communion but also for church membership.  The ecclesiastical council voted that the pastoral relation be dissolved.  The church members, by a vote of more than 200 to 23, ratified the action of the council, and finally a town meeting voted that Edwards should not be allowed to occupy the Northampton pulpit.  His dismissal is seen as a turning point in colonial American history because it marked the clear and final rejection of the old "New England Way" constructed by the Purtitan settlers of New England.  There were social and political forces at work in the town as a reflection of larger economic, social and ideological forces then reshaping American culture.  Ironically, the colonial theologian who best anticipated the intellectual shape of modern America also was its first victim.  Edwards' struggle with these forces is recorded in the many manuscript sermons that were to follow [http://edwards.yale.edu/research/about-edwards/biography] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/].

Edwards' views on the freedom of the will, virtue, God's purpose of creation and, most importantly, the religious affections, have garnered the attention of evangelical thinkers to this day.  The Great Awakening laid the spiritual foundation for the American revolution.  Edwards respected his congregation's right to self-governance, viewing their vote to oust him as "God in his providence, now calling me to part with you."  He justified the strong claim of God and religion upon the individual in a democratic society.  Edwards based his theology on personal spiritual experience, reason, observation and the common meaning of words, not scripture.  Edwards set the parameter for American religious thought then and today [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jonathan_Edwards].

Edwards' theology has a timeless appeal that makes it fascinating today as philosophy, but his importance to his own era lay in his ability to reach the hearts of his congregation.  The tragedy of Jonathan Edwards was that he was so clearly a product of the changing patterns of authority and community life in eighteenth-century New England.  He was more like a revolutionary than a Patriarch, but he thought of himself as a Patriarch.  Self-conscious as he was, introspective as he could be in moments of both triumph and failure, he could not reinvent himself.  His ideas were potentially far in advance of the time, but he kept all his best insights chained to the service of an antiquated social ideal that few other men shared by 1750.  But perhaps, like all good fathers, Edwards gave his "children" the inner resources to rebel when it came time for them to be men (Tracy).

Tracy, P.T.  Jonathan Edwards, Pastor.  Hill and Wang, New York, 1979.  (p. 194).