Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards & Smallpox: Lessons from Edwards’s Fatal Experiment

Megan Taylor
Dec 27, 2020
Editor's note: In May 2020 Place for Truth published the article below from Megan Taylor. Judging from its number of shares it ministered to many people. Now, with vaccines for Covid-19 being distributed I thought that it might be helpful to republish a very fine piece. I am sure it will serve the...

Time on Our Hands: Jonathan Edwards on the Preciousness of Time

Megan Taylor
May 30, 2020
Editor's note : In a previous post , Megan Taylor introduced us to the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards. She directed us to consider the Small Pox vaccination which ended his life. In this post. Megan once again enlists the great theologian, this time as a guide for us in our use of time...

Jonathan Edwards & Smallpox: Lessons from Edwards’s Fatal Experiment

Megan Taylor
May 21, 2020
You may be familiar with the famous American pastor who loved chocolate and flying spiders, but did you know that Jonathan Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation? Edwards was not only a theologian but a student of natural philosophy who closely followed the scientific advancements of the...

A Soul-Refreshed Life

Dustin Benge
Aug 17, 2018
On a spring day in 1747, twenty-nine-year-old David Brainerd rode horseback into the yard of a Northampton parsonage. It was the home of eminent New England pastor and theologian, Jonathan Edwards and his wife Sarah. Edwards and Brainerd, prior to this day, were relative strangers to one another,...

Continual Prayer for Revival

Michael Haykin
Jan 16, 2018
In the last post on the revitalization of the eighteenth-century Baptists, we considered the way in which prayer was a central cause. The passing years did not diminish John Sutcliff's (1752-1814) and Andrew Fuller's (1754-1815) zeal in praying for revival and stirring up such prayer. For instance...

Praying for Revival

Michael Haykin
Dec 27, 2017
Prayer has invariably preceded revival. The revitalization of the Baptists in the eighteenth century was no exception. As Andrew Fuller (1754-1815) Fuller emphasized in his Causes of Declension in Religion, and Means of Revival (1785) that we began looking at last month: "Finally, brethren, let us...

Edwards the Exegete

Thomas Kidd
Aug 1, 2016
Jonathan Edwards, the great pastor-theologian of Northampton, Massachusetts, is best known for his writings on revival and religious experience, and his defense of orthodox Calvinism in the face of "Enlightenment" critics. But at the end of the day, Edwards was mostly a preacher of the Word of God...

Edwards the Exegete

Thomas Kidd
Aug 1, 2016
Jonathan Edwards, the great pastor-theologian of Northampton, Massachusetts, is best known for his writings on revival and religious experience, and his defense of orthodox Calvinism in the face of "Enlightenment" critics. But at the end of the day, Edwards was mostly a preacher of the Word of God...

Edwards and Interpreting Providence

Thomas Kidd
Apr 19, 2016
Like many eighteenth-century Reformed pastors, Jonathan Edwards was confident in his ability to discern God's purposes in earthly events. For example, during a 1736 drought, he explained that God was chastising New Englanders for the "corruption in our hearts." Similarly, during a plague of crop-...

Is Systematic Theology Any Use?

Donald Macleod
Nov 1, 2014
Of any use to whom? Ideally, of course, to the whole world. But imagine yourself walking into a Systematic Theology classroom. Look at the students, and ponder their futures. A few will become academic theologians. Some more will be missionaries. But most will be pastors and preachers. What use is...