Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:3 (Fall 2024)
Article: Jonathan Edwards And Revivals: Contours, Conflicts, And Consequences
Author: Rhys Bezzant

Jonathan Edwards And Revivals: Contours, Conflicts, And Consequences

Rhys Bezzant

Rhys Bezzant is Principal of Ridley College, Australia where he also teaches in Church History and Theology and leads the Jonathan Edwards Center for Australia, housed at Ridley College. Dr. Bezzant is also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut. He is an ordained minister in the Anglican Church, and a Canon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia. He has written numerous articles and books, and he is presently writing a book for Oxford University Press on the Kingdom of God in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Dr. Bezzant just completed the translation of a biography of Francis of Assisi from German for Yale University Press.

It will come as no surprise that in the course of biblical history, the people of God have experienced spiritual advances as well as spiritual setbacks. Israel’s prayers have been captured in exultant praise as well as despairing lament. Though the Lord was confessed as the keeper of Israel, not allowing his people’s feet to stumble (Ps 121), on occasions they also had cause to beseech him to act in power to revive their nation and to restore their fortunes (Ps 85). Formed by promissory hope, the people of God longed for the day when cosmic harmony would be reestablished, as we note for example when the disciples inquired of Jesus in Acts 1 as to when the Kingdom would be restored to Israel. Just as the natural world experiences different seasons in regular sequence, so it was assumed God would honor his covenant to bring abundance again after periods of pruning. Was not such a divine posture central to the experience and expectation of his people when he vowed to be their God by drawing close to them in blessing (Num 6:24–26)?

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Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), preacher, pastor, and theologian of revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, witnessed, nurtured and supervised several extended periods of revival among God’s people. There had previously been five different seasons of revival, known as “harvests,” in the town during the sixty-year ministry of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard (1670–1729), but there was something distinctly new about the revivals which Edwards himself cultivated in 1734–35, and 1740–41. Edwards did not intend to overthrow the theological convictions of his Puritan forebears—he was a conservative Protestant in the Reformed tradition after all—but he did want to inflect those same commitments with a renewed and contemporary sense of direct access to the divine, or divine closeness experienced in blessing. In his estima...