His pen brought lasting influence, but Edwards' life involved far more. An activist at the center of the most important religious and social movement of his day, he oversaw an amazing local revival, which became a prototype for one of America's most influential religious practices. He worked vigorously both in promoting and in attempting to delimit the momentous colonial and international awakenings that soon followed. A heralded preacher, he delivered what became America's most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In his pastorate, he spent years shepherding parishioners through awakenings and declines, and he struggled to define the role of the church in a town and region that were making the transition from a Puritan heritage toward a revolutionary destiny. He sustained deep interests in politics and the military, especially as they bore on the international Protestant cause. In the midst of everything else, he spent much time in disciplined devotion and is sometimes most admired as a contemplative. For seven years Edwards served as a missionary to Indians in a dangerous frontier village. At his death, at age fifty-four, he was the president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Throughout his life his experiences were shaped by his relationships to his large immediate and extended family. His wife, Sarah, also became a legendary figure. They reared eleven children and nurtured what became an American dynasty.

In writing this life of Edwards, one of my goals has been to understand him as a real person in his own time. Because he became such a monumental figure, it has often been difficult to find the person behind the monuments. Further, as a leading controversialist in a vigorous religious movement, Edwards invites strong reactions. He has many ardent admirers, many detractors, and many who attempt to rehabilitate him by making him over in their own images. My aspiration, which I am sure has been only partially realized, is to make Edwards intelligible to widely diverse audiences by first attempting to depict him in his own time and in his own terms.

Readers might also begin by thinking about Edwards as an eighteenth-century figure and about how that context should shape their understanding of him. The most fascinating question that framed this book is "What was it like to live in western New England in the first half of the eighteenth century?" (or "How was that time different from our own?"). This second version of the question suggests, of course, a twenty-first-century viewpoint. My task as an historian is to make intelligible the outlook of another time, which demands taking into account the various perspectives of readers and also what has transpired since the eighteenth century. Yet it would be a failure of imagination if we were to start out - as today's histories sometimes do - by simply judging people of the past for having outlooks that are not like our own. Rather, we must first try to enter sympathetically into an earlier world and to understand its people. Once we do that we will be in a far better position both to learn from them and to evaluate their outlooks critically.

A number of things will be particularly striking to twenty-first-century readers about early eighteenth-century New England. First, the world into which Edwards was born will make a lot more sense if we think of it as British rather than American. It was, of course, significantly American, yet by the time of Edwards' death in 1758, it had not yet manifested most of the traits that were soon to be associated with "America." The American Revolution was not yet on anyone's horizon, even if with hindsight we can see that many of the potentialities were there. Edwards lived in a thoroughly pre-Revolutionary British province.

Its British or Old World character was most conspicuously evident in its rigid hierarchical structures. We might think of eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century English novels to get some sense of the social hierarchy taken for granted in eighteenth-century British America. New England, having been shaped by seventeenth-century Puritanism, had its own version of such hierarchism. Edwards was an aristocrat by New England standards. Clergymen in New England wielded more authority and could expect more deference to their opinions than in most other parts of the British World. Further, Edwards belonged to an elite extended family that was part of the ruling class of clergy, magistrates, judges, military leaders, village squires, and merchants. The Stoddards and Williamses, along with a few other families with whom they intermarried, ruled the Connecticut River Valley, or western Massachusetts (Hampshire County) and parts of Connecticut.

Eighteenth-century Britons viewed their world as monarchical and controlled by hierarchies of personal relationships. On both these counts, their assumptions were almost opposite of those of most Westerners today, who tend to think of society as in principle egalitarian and in fact controlled by impersonal forces. Eighteenth-century British-American society depended on patriarchy. One's most significant relationships were likely to be vertical rather than horizontal. Fathers had authority over families and households, the cornerstones of good order. Women, children, hired servants, indentures, and African slaves were all dependent on persons directly above them. Society was conceived of as an extended household. In this arrangement paternalism was a virtue, not a term of opprobrium. Although British people spoke much of "liberty," few had personal freedom in a modern sense. Gentlemen ruled largely through a hierarchical system of patronage extending from the king down. Good order, especially for the lower ranks of society, was enforced by strict surveillance and stern punishments. Ordinary life under any circumstances was often cruel, plagued by epidemics, unrelieved pain, and constant uncertainties about life itself. Many essential tasks were painfully difficult and time-consuming. Personal dependency was one way of dealing with a harsh and insecure world and was often taken as a matter of course.

Adding to the distresses and periodic terror in western New England was its location on the frontier of British settlements in an era of frequent warfare. Edwards lived at the vortex of conflict among three civilizations - the British Protestant, the French Catholic, and the Indian. Each was fiercely struggling to control North America. We now know how those contests turned out, but the outcome was not apparent to Edwards' generation. This international context was enormously important to Edwards. He spent vast amounts of time concerned about both Roman Catholicism and the Indians and their respective and very different places in God's plans. Edwards framed his fundamental theological concerns and especially his view of history in the Context of his perceptions of world wars, which he viewed as intimately linked to the prospects for the Gospel.

To make sense of Edwards' life, one must take seriously his religious outlook on his own terms. That might be said of any figure with strongly held views, but the point needs to be underscored regarding Edwards for several reasons. Because Edwards is associated with a number of living Christian traditions, current opinions about him are likely to be shaped by our reactions to those religious movements. Edwards was loyal to the theology inherited from the seventeenth-century Puritans and their continental "Reformed," or Calvinistic, counterparts and he was pivotal in the emergence of international evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Puritanism and Calvinism have always elicited strong reactions regarding their role in American history. Evangelicalism now comes in so many energetic varieties that it is difficult to view one of its progenitors without looking through the lens of later popularizations. Edwards anticipated some traits of later evangelicals, but the facts that he was a Calvinistic thinker, that he was rigorously intellectual, and that he was working in an eighteenth-century context make him very different from his evangelical heirs. Our challenge is to try to step into his world and to understand it in terms that he himself would recognize.

The central principle in Edwards' thought, true to his Calvinistic heritage, was the sovereignty of God. The triune eternally loving God, as revealed in Scripture, created and ruled everything in the universe. Most simply put, the sovereignty of God meant that if there were a question as to whether God" or humans should be given credit for anything good, particularly in matters of salvation, the benefit of the doubt should always go to God. Edwards avoided allowing God's rule to be thought of as a distant abstraction, as it could become. Rather, he emphasized that God's very purpose in creation was the great work of redemption in Christ. Everything in the universe pointed ultimately to the loving character of the triune God.

If the central principle of Edwards' thought was the sovereignty of God, the central practical motive in his life and work was his conviction that nothing was more momentous personally than one's eternal relationship to God. Many Christians affirm this proposition, yet most have not followed its implications for personal relationships with utter seriousness. Most who have taken it seriously have been activists rather than thinkers. Edwards was both. He built his life around disciplines designed constantly to renew that eternal perspective. In his sermons and writings he turned his immense intellectual powers to rigorously following out the implications of God's sovereignty for understanding humans' eternal destinies, as defined by his biblicist and Calvinistic heritage. If there is an emphasis that appears difficult, or harsh, or overstated in Edwards, often the reader can better appreciate his perspective by asking the question: "How would this issue look if it really were the case that bliss or punishment for a literal eternity was at stake?"

Presenting Edwards' life in terms that he would recognize and a wide variety of readers can understand may be a sufficient end in itself. If we can enter imaginatively into another time and place and into the experiences of people different from ourselves, we have achieved one of the goals of literature. For that reason I have tried to tell the story of Edwards and his family with relatively few interpretive intrusions. I hope I have done this in a way that is, as much as possible, objective in the sense of fair-minded and true to the evidence.

Nonetheless, we all have points of view. As one astute historian has recently reminded us, "objectivity is not neutrality." Even the fairest observers have biases and blind spots. They have (and they ought to have) interests. The best way to deal with these universal phenomena is to acknowledge one's point of view rather than posing as a neutral observer. That way readers can take an author's viewpoint into account, discount it if they wish, and learn from it to the extent they can. At the same time, authors who are self-conscious about their points of view can use such self-knowledge to limit unintended or unfair warping of the evidence to fit their perspectives.

That being said, I find that after spending countless hours with Edwards, my point of view regarding him is complex. He was such a multisided person and thinker that the answer to the question of what I think about him depends on the particular aspect of his life or thought we are talking about. I find him to be a person of immense personal integrity. He was intensely pious and disciplined, admirably but dauntingly so for those of more ordinary religious faith. His unrelenting intensity led him to follow the logic of his faith to its conclusions. His accompanying seriousness made him not an easy person to spend time with as a casual acquaintance, although he would have been fascinating to talk to about matters that concerned him. His prowess as a logician made him exceedingly sure of his opinions, sometimes given to pride, overconfidence, tactlessness, and an inability to credit opposing views. At the same time, he was often aware of his pride and was constantly trying - and apparently often succeeding - to subdue his arrogant spirit and to cultivate such Christian virtues as meekness, gentleness, and charity. As was common for eighteenth-century leaders, he was authoritarian, yet he was also extremely caring. He was much loved by those closest to him. His opponents found him aloof, opinionated, and intolerant. For a time he won the hearts of almost everyone in his Northampton parish; then he lost them again in a bitter dispute, a quarrel of former lovers.

My assessments of his theological views are similarly varied. My interest in Edwards arises from my admiration for aspects of his theology. As one committed to a Christian faith in a tradition that is a branch of the same Augustinian and Reformed tree, I find some of Edwards' emphases awe-inspiring. Other aspects seem to me to be brilliant analysis based on false premises. Much else falls in between. Some of his views seem dated. Others are valuable just because they come from another era and challenge assumptions that are today too easily taken for granted. Overall, since I have learned from many of his insights, my attitude toward Edwards' theology is more sympathetic than not. I try to employ that sympathy in providing readers clear accounts of his thought, usually without arguing with him, though sometimes pointing out assumptions or implications I think he did not see. My overall sympathy, then, should not be mistaken for an endorsement of all his views. One reason for careful study of great persons of the past is to be able to learn from them in a discriminating way. Excepting a few comments on the concluding pages, I have attempted to follow my working principle of explaining as best I can Edwards' thought in its historical context, pointing out what I see as especially significant but also allowing readers to make most of their own critical judgments.

In writing a life of Edwards I am not attempting a theological work nor even an essentially intellectual biography. While I hope I have adequately integrated his theology and his thought into his life, my approach also reflects my interests as a historian of American culture. My focus is primarily on understanding Edwards as a person, a public figure, and a thinker in his own time and place. Implicit in my presentation is my fascination with how Edwards fits or does not fit with the larger patterns of religion in American life. Since I do not often interrupt the narrative to make such points explicit, I can here suggest to readers some themes to keep in mind.

The largest theme concerns a question that has always been near the center of American experience, but one that is not well integrated into our histories. How does a religion that claims universal and exclusive truth fit into a pluralistic environment? This, of course, is not at all a uniquely American issue. Arguably it was also the central question for British culture in the first half of the eighteenth century. Much of the "Enlightenment" thought of that time was a direct reaction to the conflicting absolutist claims of the preceding era of deadly religious wars. The most explosive issue in British politics was still whether the monarchy would remain Anglican or revert to Roman Catholicism as it had been as recendy as 1688 under James II. If Anglican, how should the nation treat Protestant dissenters, whose Puritan forebears had fought a holy war against the Anglican monarch in the 1640s, prospered under Cromwell's dictatorial Commonwealth in the 1650s, and been harshly repressed with the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s? In the early 1700s all that was hardly forgotten. English dissenters, such as Congregationalists and Presbyterians, enjoyed toleration but were excluded from political office and the universities. In Scotland, joined with England to form the United Kingdom in 1707, the established church was Presbyterian. In this more pluralistic environment many of the leading champions of a more liberal rational Christianity were the heirs to militant Calvinists of the previous era.

Edwards came of age at a time and place that would give him an acute sense of the juxtaposition of old and new oudooks in this revolution taking place in British culture. The son of a strict Calvinistic pastor in the river town of East Windsor, Connecticut, Edwards grew up in a world where many of the ways of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism were preserved pretty much intact. Seventeenth-century Puritanism in turn was in many respects closer to the world of medieval Christendom than it was to that of even nineteenth-century America. Puritanism was part of an international Calvinistic movement to reform Christendom, not to destroy it. Its goal had been to establish one pure church supported by each Christian state.

A precocious teenage intellectual who immersed himself in the literature of the emerging British Enlightenment, the world of Locke and Newton and of Addison and Steele, Edwards was confronted with how hopelessly quaint, dated, and even laughable the provincial world of East Windsor would look to British sophistitates. Yet the New Englanders, unlike most provincials, were products of an intellectual tradition that until recendy had been as formidable as any in the world and was - as notably represented, for instance by the Edwardses' family acquaintance Cotton Mather - still making heroic efforts to keep in touch. Jonathan, after an early intellectual and spiritual crisis, emerged intensely committed to demonstrating how his heritage was not only viable but the answer to all the questions posed by the new world of his day. Those answers were not only intellectual, but also practical, built around awakenings and missions as the engines through which the triune God would eventually bring the modern world to his love in Christ.

Edwards' life presents a particularly dramatic and influential instance of a perennial American story. Countless Americans reared in conservative religious traditions have confronted the troubling issue of how their exclusive faith should relate to a pluralistic modern American environment. That tension has been felt especially among persons in ethno-religious communities - of which the English Puritans were one of the first instances - who brought with them Old World ideals concerning the one true religion. Much of the history of religion in America has been written to emphasize the triumph of pluralism. Perhaps rightly so. That has meant, however, that those who have never conceded the premise that all or most religions, or even most Christian denominations, are more or less equal, have not been taken as seriously in our histories as they might. Even today there are vast numbers of Americans who, although committed to live at peace with other religious groups, believe it is a matter of eternal life or death to convert members of those groups to their own faith. Like it or not, such evangelistic religion has been and continues to be a major part of the experiences of many ordinary Americans. The dynamics of such religious experience need to be understood if one is to understand large tracts of American culture. Indeed, the tensions between religious exclusivism and pluralism are among the leading unresolved issues shaping the twenty-first-century world.

Edwards' eighteenth-century Calvinistic evangelicalism is significant not merely as an early instance of a wider phenomenon, but also because it played a prominent role in subsequent American history. After the American Revolution, New England Calvinism with a deep Edwardsian imprint emerged as one of the most influential movements shaping the new American voluntary religious culture. Edwards' grandson Timothy Dwight was an early leader of resurgent evangelical Calvinism, and Lyman Beecher, progenitor of the famous Beecher family, was one of Dwight's most effective lieutenants. New England Congregationalists and their Presbyterian allies carried the evangelical Calvinist campaigns into the upper "west" (now upper Midwest). By the 1830s their voluntary organizations for missions, evangelism, and reform had combined budgets larger than that of the federal government. Before the Civil War these heirs to the now-contested Edwardsian heritage or their near counterparts controlled most of the nation's leading colleges, including the state "universities." They were leaders in the reform movements, including temperance and antislavery, and were leading figures in the moral reform wing of the Whig Party and then in Republicanism. To cite the best-known example, Harriet Beecher Stowe often wrote about and agonized over her Edwardsian heritage, from which she only gradually departed. On the eve of the Civil War she published a theological novel whose leading character was Edwards' protege and first biographer, Samuel Hopkins.

Edwards' early eighteenth-century version of the tensions between a rigorous exclusivist Christianity and modern life were very different from those of his nineteenth-century heirs, yet the latter can hardly be understood without knowing about the former. If we are comparing Edwards' wrestlings with such issues to those of his more recent counterparts, the differences are still greater, even if the comparisons may be illuminating. Our sense of encountering perennial cultural themes, or even perennial human themes, always needs to be tempered by a sense of differences among eras.

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable since Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses. Most strikingly, the standard narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practrce came to be much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity flourished in American and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports. The particularities of Edwards' life - so different in many ways from what followed - do not explain all that, even if they shed light on it. Nonetheless, the larger point is that histories of America - or of the modern world for that matter - need to integrate people like Edwards into their accounts.

I have been here emphasizing Edwards' significance in the history of American religion and culture, yet I realize that many readers will also be concerned with something larger. Edwards is, after all, most important as a figure in the history of Christianity. For one thing, although much of his influence has been mediated by his American setting, one should not forget that Edwards was a citizen of the British Empire and part of an international Reformed movement. He is still a revered figure in those circles and in broader evangelicalism. Theologians continue to debate his insights. How he is to be evaluated at those levels will depend largely on one's religious commitments.

The first goal of a biographer, it seems to me, should be to tell a good story that illuminates not only the subject, but also the landscapes surrounding that person and the horizons of the readers. Unlike specialized studies that analyze every intellectual issue and historical debate, much of the illumination should come simply from the telling a story. That story should reveal a real person whose successes were achieved in the midst of anxieties, weaknesses, and failings. The tensions of a life are often what cast most light, not only on the person but also on the culture and on wider human experience. In the case of renowned thinkers, we also want to understand and learn from their thought. Once again it is the tensions, both within the thinker's own tradition and between that tradition and its competitors, that are most illuminating for understanding the creativity and the limits of the person's thought.

Edwards was involved with many of the most momentous issues of his day, and his life does not lack for drama and intrigue. I hope I have successfully uncovered and recounted some of that. A biographer's problem is that the goal of being comprehensive sometimes competes with the main story lines. In any life many things are going on at the same time, and some significant things do not contribute to dramatic narrative as well as others. Yet the understanding of a life can also be enriched by taking into account the interconnections among seemingly disparate themes.

I have tried to keep in view Edwards as a person, especially as a person in a family setting, as I deal with the larger issues. That is more of a challenge than it would be for some well-documented lives because the overwhelming proportion of his surviving writings deal with theological or ecclesiastical matters. Even his family letters seldom deal with personal matters outside of a theological framework. That underscores the point that for Edwards one cannot draw a line between his theological or ecclesiastical roles and the person in some more essential sense. Edwards' roles were so integrated in his life that they were basic to who he was. Even so, we know that there was more beneath that formidable surface and sometimes we do see it. Behind the roles of theologian, pastor, and preacher that shaped most of his writings, we can also get enough intimate glimpses of him and his family to gain a sense that we are dealing with a real person with weaknesses and strengths.

The above was the Introduction to Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George M. Marsden.