A Glorious Alteration

Jonathan Edwards, 1734
Taken from the Kairos Journal
June 6, 2011

In the winter of 1733-34, Jonathan Edwards, pastor of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts, exhorted the young people in his congregation to stop their practice of “merry-making” and “company-keeping” on the Sabbath. To that end, he also urged their parents to meet together the next evening to discuss the situation and decide on a course of action. For most of those sitting in the congregation, Edwards’ sermon was nothing new. He had been condemning the young people’s carousing since he had become the church’s pastor in 1729, and no one really expected this sermon to have any greater effect than the ones before it. To everyone’s amazement, however, the parents found their planning meetings to be completely unnecessary. Declaring themselves convinced by Edwards’ sermon, the young people agreed to take his advice and stop their sinful revelry at once.^[1] That decision was the first spark of a revival which would eventually cause nothing less than, in Edwards’ words, “a glorious alteration” of the entire Northampton society.^[2]

 

Edwards’ grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, had pastored the Northampton church for some sixty years before his death in 1729. During that time, he witnessed five “harvests” in which an unusual number of people were converted to Christian faith. None of these, however, had much effect on the creeping worldliness which had taken hold in Northampton.

 

One of the biggest problems was a loosening of parental discipline. Reacting to what they considered a too-strict upbringing, Northampton parents had begun allowing their children to walk the streets at night and even congregate at local taverns to “frolic” with members of the opposite sex. Even worse, they had lately taken to indulging a practice which would be, Edwards said, “looked upon as shameful and disgraceful”^[3] in any other country in the world: “bundling,” in which parents allowed two young people to spend the night in bed together only partly clothed. Not surprisingly, sexual immorality was commonplace, and premarital pregnancies were reaching alarming rates. The adults were not much better. Northampton had three taverns where farmers and tradesmen gathered to relax, conduct business, and engage in other less-innocent behavior. Debauched frivolity was the usual atmosphere at the taverns, but it was not uncommon for some long-standing feud between two factions to break out in violence.^[4]

 

This was the culture at which Edwards took aim in his sermon during the winter of 1733-34. For some months after that Sunday, the young people of the town complied marvelously with their pastor’s exhortation. The “merry-making” and “frolicking” came to an end. Then, in the spring of 1734, two young people—a man and a woman—fell suddenly ill and died within a few days of each other. Seizing the moment, Edwards preached both their funeral sermons, one a sad plea not to waste life on earthly pleasures, the other a joyful meditation on the comforts to be taken in the death of a saint. The effect of his sermons was electric. By fall of that year, Northampton was on the verge of a spiritual awakening. Instead of carousing through the streets at night, the young people were now meeting on Thursday evenings for what they termed, “social religion,” and the adults soon adopted a similar practice.

 

Within a few months, the entire town was being transformed by the revival. “[T]he noise amongst the dry bones waxed louder and louder,” Edwards wrote.^[5] Old quarrels, back-biting, and contentions gave way to group studies, prayer, and singing. Secular business no longer dominated people’s minds, but they thought and talked instead about eternal matters like sin, salvation, and redemption. People attended eagerly to the means of grace—Bible reading, prayer, meditation, church services, and private conferences with the pastor—and gave up their sinful recreations. The taverns were left empty. When he finally had time to assess the revival, Edwards estimated that in a period of only six months more than 300 people had been brought to saving faith in Christ.^[6] The result?

“[I]n the spring and summer following, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor so full of joy . . . as it was then.”^[7]

 

On one level, Jonathan Edwards was greatly surprised at the “glorious alteration” God effected in his town. On another level, however, he must have expected such a transformation every time he mounted his pulpit to preach. For if the Word of God is truly as powerful as Christians claim, then it will never be confined to an ecclesiastical teapot. Boldly and faithfully preached, it will spill out into all of human society, reforming and transforming as it goes.

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[1]       George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 151-153.

[2]       John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema, A Jonathan Edwards Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 63.

[3]       Marsden, 130.

[4]       Ibid., 130-131.

[5]       Smith, Stout, and Minkema, 62.

[6]       Ibid., 65, 68.

[7]       Ibid., 63.