About Edwards
Jonathan Edwards : Missionary
by Professor Rachel Wheeler, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Jonathan Edwards is rarely remembered for his work as a missionary. His seven years at the end of his life spent at the frontier mission post at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is ambivalently remembered as a period of productive exile following his dismissal from his Northampton pulpit in 1750. It was in his Stockbridge study that he composed his philosophical and theological masterpieces (Freedom of the Will, Nature of True Virtue, and Original Sin).
However, Edwards’ life was intimately linked with mission efforts long before he took up the post of missionary at the frontier settlement of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Members of his family had played central roles in the founding of the Stockbridge mission, the first substantial mission since the devastations of King Philip’s War in the 1670s. Edwards shared his grandfather Solomon Stoddard’s view that colonial wars and other trials were God’s punishment for neglecting the colony’s commitment (as spelled out in the 1629 Massachusetts Bay charter) to bring the gospel to the Indians. Stoddard had chastised New Englanders for their neglect of Indian souls in his 1723 sermon, Whether God Is Not Angry with the Country for Doing So Little toward the Conversion of the Indians? Stoddard’s son, and Edwards’ uncle, John Stoddard was largely responsible for negotiating between the Housatonic-Mahican Indians and the Massachusetts Government, for the purchase of Housatonic lands in 1724 for English settlement, and ten years later, for the founding of the mission that came to be known as Stockbridge. Edwards’ cousin, the Reverend Stephen Williams, had been captured as a child in the 1704 Indian raid on Deerfield. As an adult, Williams was also a key ministerial proponent of the Housatonic mission.
When Edwards’ name was proposed as a possible successor to the recently deceased John Sergeant in 1750, Edwards’ kinsman and Stockbridge resident Ephraim Williams, Jr. objected, believing (not without reason) that Edwards was ill-suited for the task. He believed Edwards was unsocial, impolitic, and too old to learn the Indians’ language. Williams lamented what a shame it was that “a head so full of divinity should be so empty of politics.” Nonetheless, he anticipated the rise in property values that Edwards’ presence would bring. [1]
While Edwards did indeed spend long hours in his study upon his move to Stockbridge, he won the trust and the respect of Stockbridge’s Indian residents. Edwards developed a deep sympathy for the Stockbridge Indians, perhaps in part because the main seekers after Indian lands in Stockbridge were members of the same Williams clan that had helped oust Edwards from Northampton! In countless letters to the Boston overseers of the mission, Edwards attempted to protect the Stockbridge Indians from unfair dealings, while also defending his own actions in the management of the mission.
As pastor, Edwards preached regularly to his Indian pastorate (more than 200 manuscript sermons to the Indians survive) with the assistance of his interpreter, John Wauwaumpequunaunt. Edwards did not compromise on Calvinist doctrine in these sermons, but he often encouraged his Indian congregants by reminding them that Christ had died for some of all nations, and that worldly power and wealth (something the Stockbridge Indians clearly lacked) were no signs of election. Edwards’ experience in catechizing Stockbridge youth led him to develop innovative ideas about education that emphasized the instructive power of narrative instead of rote memorization.
Beyond his work in Stockbridge, it was Edwards’ work as editor that had the largest impact on missions. His publication of David Brainerd’s journal in 1749, two years after the melancholic missionary’s death from tuberculosis, was popular at the time of its printing and came to be Edwards’ most frequently reprinted work, providing inspiration to many missionaries in the newly energized international mission movement of the nineteenth century. Edwards’ Life of Brainerd helped to cement the image of the self-denying missionary who subjected his body and spirit to great trials.
[1] Ephraim Williams, Jr. to Jonathan Ashley, May 2, 1751, in Wyllis Wright, ed., Colonel Ephraim Williams: A Documentary Life (Pittsfield: Berkshire County Historical Society, 1970), p. 61.
Professor Rachel Wheeler has worked extensively on the interaction between Indians and missionaries in early America. After completing her dissertation at Yale University, she has taught at Lewis and Clark College and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
• Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George Marsden
For further bibliographic resources, check out JEC Recommends...
Also, check out our Bookstore
