Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening
Revival comes to New England
Jonathan Edwards is the most formidable theological mind in colonial America and the most surprised man in Northampton when revival breaks out in his congregation in the winter of 1734.
He has been preaching on justification by faith — working through the Reformed doctrine carefully, precisely, in the way that his congregation of New England Congregationalists expects. And then something happens that his theological framework does not predict: the town is seized.
Family by family, week by week, the news spreads through Northampton that something is happening at the church. The tavern empties. The conversations change. People who have been indifferent to religion for years cannot stop thinking about eternity. Edwards estimates that three hundred people come to faith in six months in a town of eleven hundred.
He writes it down — his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God — and it circulates in England, where John Wesley and George Whitefield read it. It is part of what launches them into open-air preaching. The New England awakening and the English awakening are feeding each other across the Atlantic.
Edwards is not comfortable with everything that follows. He is a careful man and the revival produces manifestations — weeping, crying out, physical collapse — that he does not entirely endorse but cannot entirely dismiss. He develops a theology of religious affections: genuine revival affects the whole person, but emotion is not its own validation. The test is the fruit.
“The work of God's Spirit is not to be judged of by its uncommon effects on the bodies of men — but by the abiding fruit in the lives of those in whom the work is wrought.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, 1742 AD
“Therefore, by their fruits you will know them.”
Edwards watched revival break out in his town and immediately began asking: how do we know this is real?
The question is not skepticism. It is discernment — the recognition that not everything that looks like the Spirit is the Spirit, and that the test is not the intensity of the experience but the durability of the change.
The fruit. Not the feeling. The feeling may be genuine and produce no lasting transformation. The fruit — the changed life, the renewed relationship, the sustained love — this is the evidence that the work was real.
Have you experienced religious intensity that did not produce lasting fruit? And have you experienced quiet transformation that was more real than anything dramatic? What does the difference tell you about how the Spirit works?