About Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards was a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and philosopher born in East Windsor, Connecticut in 1703. Widely regarded as the greatest theologian in American history, Edwards stood at the center of the First Great Awakening — the remarkable revival that swept through the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s.

Educated at Yale at the age of thirteen, Edwards was a prodigy whose mind ranged freely across Scripture, philosophy, and natural science. He read Newton and Locke as a teenager and spent the rest of his life working out the implications of God's absolute sovereignty over a world made of light and beauty and sin.

“There is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Lamb of God — infinite highness and infinite condescension meet in him.”

His most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was preached in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741. Accounts record that congregation members wept and cried out before Edwards had finished speaking. Yet Edwards was no mere hellfire preacher. His sermons on divine love, the beauty of Christ, and the nature of true grace are among the most tender and penetrating in the English language.

Edwards served as minister in Northampton, Massachusetts for over twenty years before being dismissed by his congregation in 1750 over a dispute about communion requirements. He spent the following years as a missionary to the Housatonic Indians in Stockbridge, writing some of his greatest theological works. In 1757 he was appointed president of what would become Princeton University, dying of a smallpox inoculation just weeks after taking office in 1758.

His sermons — all in the public domain — remain among the most searching, beautiful, and demanding pieces of religious literature ever produced on American soil. This app exists to make them accessible again: in full text, and in audio voiced by AI trained to carry their weight.