Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was an American theologian and philosopher, regarded as the most influential religious thinker of colonial America. He entered Yale College at thirteen and was ordained minister at Northampton, Massachusetts in 1727. His preaching helped ignite the Great Awakening of 1739–1740, and his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God became one of the most famous in American history. His treatise on the Freedom of the Will remains a landmark of Reformed theology. Dismissed from his Northampton congregation in 1750 over a communion dispute, he served as a missionary to the Housatonic Indians before being appointed president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), where he died shortly after of complications from a smallpox inoculation.