Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 19:2 (Fall 2022)
Article: Wealth And Poverty In The Life And Thought Of Jonathan Edwards
Author: Chris Chun

Wealth And Poverty In The Life And Thought Of Jonathan Edwards

Chris Chun

Chris Chun serves as director of the Jonathan Edwards Center and professor of church history at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California.

Yale University invited me to be one of the speakers for the “Yale and the International Jonathan Edwards Conference” on October 2–4, 2019.1 This meeting brought together prominent Edwards scholars and the directors of the international Jonathan Edwards Center affiliates from around the world. While the paper presentations were uniformly interesting, I particularly enjoyed the special exhibition from the Edwards Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library hosted by Ken Minkema, director of JEC at Yale. Among several fascinating handwritten manuscripts, one peculiar artifact caught my attention, so I took out my phone and captured the photo below.

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After her husband was dismissed from the Northampton parish, Sarah Edwards and her daughters helped support the family’s livelihood by making decorated fans out of silk paper. Ironically, the “great” Jonathan Edwards, who Harvard’s Perry Miller once dubbed as “the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene,”2 was financially unable to purchase enough paper to support all his writing endeavors. As a consequence, Edwards had resorted to writing down his thoughts on scraps of papers, including leftover scraps of pages from fans. This photograph of a leftover fan illustrates the extent of poverty Edwards and his family experienced during his lifetime.

Young Edwards had not been raised in poverty. On the contrary, he was brought up in an aristocratic setting. When Solomon Stoddard passed away in 1729, Edwards succeeded his maternal grandfather and became the Northampton congregation’s pastor—one of the wealthiest and most influential parishes in the colony. However, as Edwards moved to Stockbridge in 1751 after the dismissal from his pastorate, he experienced poverty firsthand. The two towns of Northampton and Stockbridge could not have been more contrasting in terms of their social and economic standing. The former was an economic hub for commerce, and the latter was a wilderness outpost on the western frontier at the edges of civilized society in colonial America.

Three years before the venerable Stoddard’s death, twenty-four-year-old Edwards came from Yale to Northampton to be groomed to take over one of the most illustrious pulpits in a wealthy town in Massachusetts. This congregation was able to attract Edwards with...