When Jonathan Edwards, who has been rightly described as ‘America’s Augustine’, left his pastoral charge in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1750, he received a number of ‘attractive’ ministry offers, including the presidency of a theological college in Scotland. He chose instead to go with his family to a small out-of-the-way frontier village by the name of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Why this unusual choice?
Some have surmised that Edwards settled in Stockbridge because the rigours of ministry among a smaller congregation, which consisted mostly of Mahican Indians, would prove minimal, and he could then devote himself largely to his study and the major treatises that he wanted to write books on such issues as free will and original sin.
In other words, some have viewed Edwards in Stockbridge almost like an academic scholar on an extended sabbatical! Samuel Hopkins, in his important memoir of his mentor, seems to imply something like this when he states that God gave Edwards ‘a quiet retreat’ at Stockbridge where he could pursue his writing. This view has been furthered by the belief that Edwards simply preached rehashed sermons from his Northampton years.
Evidence to the contrary...
An initial clue as to why he came to Stockbridge is found in the geographical location of the home in which Jonathan Edwards and his family lived during their sojourn in Stockbridge from 1751 to 1757. The house is long gone, though its location is marked today by a sundial. Edwards purposely located it among the Mahican Indians of the town. Edwards was making a clear statement, namely, that he had genuinely come to minister to these people. It is noteworthy in this regard that his son Jonathan Jr. would later recall that his boyhood friends were all Indians and that he never spoke English outside of the family circle.
Edwards’ large correspondence from this period of his life also reveals that his pre-eminent goal was to reach the Native Americans with the life-giving gospel. And his sermons from this period show that the majority of them were not simply repeats of sermons that he had preached in Northampton, but brand-new sermons constructed with careful attention to the audience to whom they were to be preached and the end to which they were intended.
Edwards had a great desire to see the world-wide advance of the kingdom of Christ and he was convinced that the conversion of the peoples of North America had a place in this advance. The life of David Brainerd and his work among the first peoples of America would have influenced Edwards’ thinking in this regard as he edited and published the life and diary of this eminent example of genuine missionary piety. Edwards had thus maintained an interest in the success of the Stockbridge mission over the years and had persuaded his Northampton congregation to invest heavily in the work during the 1740s.
This focus of Edwards’ Stockbridge years, though, has not been appreciated until very recently, clear evidence of which is the fact that up until 1999 not one of the sermons that he preached to the Stockbridge Indians had been published. A number of these sermons are now available in a volume of Edwards’ sermons covering the years 1743 to 1758, volume 25 in the multi-volume critical edition of Edwards’ works published by Yale University Press. They reveal Edwards as a missionary preacher who was able to communicate plainly and effectively in his new evangelistic sphere.
Next month, we shall have the opportunity to look at one of these sermons and listen as Edwards preached the gospel to a group of Mohawk chiefs.
