Freedom of the Will

Having graduated from Yale at the mere age of seventeen, Jonathan Edwards is ranked among America's most pre-eminent philosopher-theologians. Edwards wrote Freedom of the Will in 1754 while serving in Massachusetts as a missionary to a native tribe of Housatonic Indians. In this text, Edwards investigates the contrasting Calvinist and Arminian views about free will, God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency. As Edwards attempts to resolve the contention surrounding these topics, he relies on a variety of textual resources including the Bible and philosophy works of enlightenment thinkers. This book can be challenging due to Edwards' emphasis on philosophical reasoning, but Edwards strives to educate his audience by frequently defining confusing terms and explaining controversial passages in depth. Freedom of the Will is relevant to every Christian because it addresses difficult questions about desire, choice, good, and evil.

About the Author :
Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, to Timothy Edwards, pastor of East Windsor, and Esther Edwards. The only son in a family of eleven children, he entered Yale in September, 1716 when he was not yet thirteen and graduated four years later (1720) as valedictorian. He received his Masters three years later. As a youth, Edwards was unable to accept the Calvinist sovereignty of God. However, in 1721 he came to the conviction, one he called a "delightful conviction." He was meditating on 1 Timothy 1:17, and later remarked, "As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before... I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven; and be as it were swallowed up in him for ever!" From that point on, Edwards delighted in the sovereignty of God. In 1727 he was ordained minister at Northampton and assistant to his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. He was a student minister, not a visiting pastor, his rule being thirteen hours of study a day. In the same year, he married Sarah Pierpont, then age seventeen, daughter of James Pierpont (1659-1714), a founder of Yale, originally called the Collegiate School. In total, Jonathan and Sarah had eleven children. Throughout his time in Northampton his preaching brought remarkable religious revivals. Jonathan Edwards was a key figure in what has come to be called the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. Edwards was dismissed over the issue of open communion in 1750. He then moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, then a frontier settlement, where he ministered to a small congregation and served as missionary to the Housatonic Indians. There, having more time for study and writing, he completed his celebrated work, The Freedom of the Will (1754). Edwards was elected president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in early 1758. On March 22, 1758, he died of fever at the age of fifty-four following experimental inoculation for smallpox and was buried in the President's Lot in the Princeton cemetery beside his son-in-law, Aaron Burr.