Preacher in the Hands of an Angry Church

Jonathan Edwards's church kicked him out after 23 years of ministry,
but the crisis proved his greatness was not merely intellectual.
by Chris Armstronge

As messy dismissals of ministers go, the
1750 ejection of Jonathan Edwards by his Northampton congregation was
among the messiest. The fact that it involved the greatest theologian
in American history—the central figure of the Great
Awakening—is almost beside the point. The fact that it took place
in a New England fast moving from theocratic "city on a hill" to
democratic home of liberty is more relevant.

But another aspect is worth a closer look: Friends and enemies alike
agreed that in the long, degenerating discontent, Edwards continued to
love and pray for—or at least tolerate and refrain from
attacking—his people, even when they bared their fangs.

Salary controversies and power struggles marked his ministry during the
1740s. In the infamous "bad book" episode of 1744, some teen boys in
the church distributed a midwife's manual, using it to taunt and make
suggestive comments in front of girls. When the culprits were summoned
before the church, their response, according to documents of the
proceedings, was "contemptuous … toward the authority of this
Church."

Edwards chose to read before the church a list containing,
indiscriminately, the names of both the young distributors as well as
the purported witnesses. Some parents were outraged at Edwards.

Another issue was Edwards's personality and style as a minister. At the
outset of his ministry at Northampton, for example, he decided that he
would not pay the customary regular visits to his congregants, but
would rather come to their side only when called in cases of sickness
or other emergency. This made him seem, to some in the church, cold and
distant.

An Edwards "disciple," Samuel Hopkins, later wrote that this practice
was not due to lack of affection and concern for his people: "For their
good he was always writing, contriving, labouring; for them he had
poured out ten thousand fervent prayers; and they were dear to him
above any other people under heaven."

Rather, Edwards had made a clear-eyed assessment of his own gifts and
decided that he was unable to match the graceful gregariousness of
those ministers who had a "knack at introducing profitable, religious
discourse in a free, natural, and … undesigned way."

Thus he would "do the greatest good to souls … by preaching and
writing, and conversing with persons under religious impressions in his
study, where he encouraged all such to repair."

Edwards's ministry might yet have endured, however, were it not for the
death of his uncle, Colonel John Stoddard, in 1748. Born in 1682, 21
years before Edwards, the colonel had built a friendship with his
nephew. A sharp thinker, a county judge, and a savvy politician, John
was a militia colonel who had become commander-in-chief of the
Massachusetts western frontier by 1744. Stoddard wore—at least in
the secular sphere—the mantle of his father and Edwards's
grandfather, "pope" of the Connecticut Valley, Solomon Stoddard.

Edwards found himself often leaning on his uncle's influence to
navigate the affairs of the church. Thus when Stoddard died, Edwards
lost not only an uncle but a powerful ally and confidante.

As Iain Murray put it in his biography of Edwards: "There would be no
open criticism of Edwards as long as Stoddard sat appreciatively in his
pew beneath the pulpit in the meeting-house Sunday by Sunday." Once the
colonel was gone, however, that changed dramatically.

Stoddard's heir-apparent as Hampshire County's leading figure was
Edwards's cousin Israel Williams, a Harvard graduate, imperious in
manner and implacably set against Edwards. In his early
nineteenth-century biography, descendant S. E. Dwight named Israel and
several others of the Williams clan as having "religious sentiments
[that] differed widely from" those of Edwards. Their opposition soon
became "a settled and personal hostility." Williams served as counselor
and ringleader to Edwards's opponents. Joining this opposition were
another cousin, Joseph Hawley Jr., 21 years Edwards's junior.

Visible saints, hidden agendas

The same year John Stoddard died, an event finally pushed the hostile
faction into open revolt.

For years, Edwards had been uncomfortable with the lenient policy on
membership and communion set by his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard,
Edwards's predecessor at Northampton. Stoddard had allowed almost
anyone to join and to partake, hoping that membership and communion
might encourage true conversion. In 1748, Edwards changed the policy
and told an applicant for church membership that he must first make a
public "profession of godliness."

Thus Edwards rejected the "Halfway Covenant"—the longstanding
compromise of the Puritans who had, generations after planting their
religious colonies, found their church membership dwindling. That
compromise had reversed the traditional Puritan requirement that new
church members be "visible saints," godly in word and deed.

When the congregation saw that Edwards intended to return to the
earlier, stricter Puritan position, demanding not only a profession of
faith, but also evidence of repentance and holiness, a firestorm arose.
Many of the church's leading members felt Edwards's innovation was a
direct threat.

Two revivals had produced many converts, but, as biographer Patricia
Tracy put it, "Men and women who had been recognized as visible saints
in Northampton still wallowed in clandestine immorality and flagrant
pride."

Though Edwards knew, as he notes in his letters, that he was likely to
lose his pastorate as a result, he stuck to his principles.

A council of the congregation put a moratorium on new memberships until
the issue of criteria could be resolved. Edwards told them he planned
to preach on his reasons for changing the policy. They forbade him to
do so. Edwards began to write a book on the matter. Few read it, and
too late to do much good.

In 1750, a council was called to consider whether the congregation
would dismiss its minister. No one doubted what the conclusion would be.

Edwards's friend David Hall noted in his diary the minister's reaction
when on June 22, 1750, the council handed down its decision:

"That faithful witness received the shock, unshaken. I never saw the
least symptoms of displeasure in his countenance the whole week but he
appeared like a man of God, whose happiness was out of the reach of his
enemies and whose treasure was not only a future but a present good
… even to the astonishment of many who could not be at rest
without his dismission."

46 and unemployed

Edwards wrote that he now found himself a 46-year-old ex-minister
"fitted for no other business but study," with a large family to
provide for. Although he knew "we are in the hands of God, and I bless
him, I am not anxious concerning his disposal of us," he fretted over
his situation in letters to friends. Yet neither the distressing
conditions nor the continuing antagonism of his opponents drew him out
to open attack.

Remarkably (and partly because of financial need), Edwards agreed to
continue preaching at the church while they searched for a replacement.
But his Farewell Sermon also indicates he acted out of continued
concern for the flock. He continued through mid-November, despite the
Town maliciously barring him, a month after his dismissal, from using
its common grazing land.

Finally in December 1750, after an anxious autumn during which he had
even considered removing his entire family to Scotland to accept an
invitation there, Edwards accepted a charge in Massachusetts's "wild
west," the Indian town of Stockbridge. There he would labor the rest of
his life, pursue his theological thinking to its most brilliant
heights, and create one of the most enduring missionary biographies of
all time, the life story of his young friend David Brainerd.

Belated praise

In 1760, his former enemy, cousin Joseph Hawley, wrote to Edwards's
friend David Hall, confessing that "vast pride, self-sufficiency,
ambition, and vanity" had animated his leadership in the "melancholy
contention" with Edwards. He repented of his earlier failure to render
the respect due Edwards as a "most able, diligent and faithful pastor."

Hawley concluded, "I am most sorely sensible that nothing but that
infinite grace and mercy which saved some of the betrayers and
murderers of our blessed Lord, and the persecutors of his martyrs, can
pardon me; in which alone I hope for pardon, for the sake of Christ,
whose blood, blessed by God, cleanseth from all sin."

On June 22, 1900, exactly 150 years after Edwards's dismissal, a group
gathered at the First Church in Northampton to unveil a bronze memorial.

H. Norman Gardiner, a professor of philosophy at Smith College and
chairman of the memorial committee, characterized Edwards's ejection as
"a public rejection and banishment" that remained "a source of reproach
to his church and people." He noted the "hatred, malice, and
uncharitableness which characterized the opposition to him," for which,
to Gardiner, no apology either contemporary or modern could atone.

Edwards would have disagreed, arguing instead that even such deeply
wounding actions as the aggravated and wrongful dismissal of a pastor
from his pulpit of 23 years are not unforgivable. In that
understanding, as in so much else, Edwards was far ahead both of his
enemies and of many of us today.


Copyrights © 2006 Evangelist Joe Murray