Jonathan Edwards


 * 1703-1758
 * b. in East Windsor, CT
 * Destined to be a reverend in the Presbyterian Church, was only male grandchild of the “Pope of Connecticut Valley”
 * “Studious and dutiful child”
 * Wanted to perfect himself (like Benjamin Franklin), wrote in journal: “never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way.” Followed extremely regimented schedule
 * • Although very intelligent, he wrote things easily understood by the common man
 * Influenced by John Locke
 * Locke confirmed Edwards' convictions that we must do more than comprehend religious ideas; we must be moved by them, we must know them experientially: the difference, as he says,  is like that between reading the word fire and actually being burned.
 * There is nothing that an individual can do warrants his or her salvation, that people entirely motivated by self-love, and that it is only supernatural grace that alters their natural depravitity
 * "great awakening"
 * When he began to name sinners from the pulpit, he fell out of favor and was forced out of the church.
 * Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
 * Deuteronomy 32.35: Their foot shall slide in due time.
 * In this excerpt he uses the comparison of the New Englanders to ancient Israelites ("who, not withstanding all God's wonderful works towards them, remanined (as in verse 28) void of counsel, having no understanding in them"
 * He is saying that the Puritans, like the Israelites, will be punished. They were always exposed to places and situations in which they could slip, or that through only their fault could fall, he explains: "That the reason why they are fallen already, and do not fall now, is only that God's appointed time is not come, For it is said that when that due time, or appointed times comes, their foot shall slide."