Christians have always been tossed around by the waves of war. They have ridden the crest and they have been dashed against the rocks. But God-centred people confound both victory and defeat. Looking through the lens of God’s sovereign plan, Christians see a bigger stage and a greater drama.

In the 1750s the future of North America hung in the balance. The Anglo-French rivalry which rippled all the way to India was likewise threatening to convulse the New World. British America’s rapidly growing colonies had a soft underbelly. The French, despite their vast numerical inferiority in America, were shrewder in their dealings with American Indians. They focused narrowly on forts, trade routes, and alliances; all supplemented by the tireless efforts of the Jesuits. The British colonies, particularly in New England, had long exceeded this model. They brimmed with self-sufficient colonists including land-hungry men who had little interest in British imperial diplomacy. They increasingly antagonized American Indian tribes and drove them into the grateful arms of the French.

For many British Americans the looming conflict was far more than an Anglo-French power struggle. And Jonathan Edwards had more at stake in the tussle than most. In 1751 he and his family moved to the unprotected frontier town of Stockbridge at the western end of Massachusetts. The settlement was a brave missionary venture established fifteen years earlier thanks to funds from England. About 200 Mahican Indian families lived in the prime land along the river in addition to ten English families on the surrounding higher ground. There was a day-school and a boarding school for Indian children. Edwards arrived to replace the recently deceased John Sargeant as the pastor of this fledgling flock. Edwards the established minister became Edwards the cross-cultural missionary.

Jonathan Edwards through his Life of David Brainerd and An Humble Attempt to Promote…Extraordinary Prayer was the spiritual godfather of Anglo-American Protestant missions. But what of his own proto-missionary experience on the frontier; how did he view his role?

He viewed his mission with the same Scripture-soaked and future-oriented framework with which he saw all of life. Edwards was a postmillennialist. He believed that Scripture clearly prophesied the defeat of Satan’s visible kingdom followed by the spiritual reign of Christ on earth through his exalted church. This millennium would feature a final struggle at the end before Christ’s return and the resurrection of the dead. The fall of Satan’s visible kingdom that would herald the start of the millennium necessarily included, according to Edwards, the downfall of heathenism, Islam, and the Antichrist. The Antichrist was to Edwards, and most Protestants of the day, self-evidently the Church of Rome.

As historian Gerald McDermott noted, Edwards believed ‘the present generation was standing on the threshold of the age that would precipitate the millennium.’ That impetus made Edwards a tireless advocate for the spread of the gospel. This work of the expanding kingdom, Edwards insisted in A History of the Work of Redemption, ‘shall be accomplished, not by the authority of princes, nor by the wisdom of learned men, but by God’s Holy Spirit…by the preaching of the gospel.’

But the God-directed spread of gospel preaching does not occur in a vacuum. Settled in the precarious security of Stockbridge, Edwards was struck by the mutual relationship between the urgency of gospel work among the ‘heathen’ American Indians and the need to secure British America from disastrous defeat. By February 1752 Edwards knew that French Catholic victory in America could be imminent and reasoned that this was ‘both the natural consequence, and also a just punishment, of our so much neglecting the eternal welfare of those people [the Indians].’ Edwards was scathing of his countrymen’s actions that had endangered both British America and the cause of the gospel. He identified the litany of crimes against the Indians from the sale of rum to murder. He warned that ‘we have reason to fear God will make them a sore scourge to us as a just punishment of our cruelty to their bodies and souls.’

In all of this Edwards saw God’s guidance. ‘I think this is the voice of providence,’ Edwards wrote, ‘…that if ever North America is regained from a subjection to Antichristian powers, it must be more by spreading the light of the gospel than by any policy, wealth or arms of the British Empire.’ The triumph of God’s gospel necessarily entailed, for Edwards, the defeat of the influence of the Catholic Antichrist and the evangelisation of American Indians. In this way Edwards could entreat God for military victory whilst personally labouring for the salvation of his American Indian neighbours.

It is easy to use subsequent events to argue both for and against Edwards’ perception. The British did triumph in North America and the gospel-influenced United States became the world’s premier source of Protestant missionaries. On the other hand, Protestant influence in America did not prevent colonists and their ancestors from continuing to deceive, rob and murder thousands of American Indians. And Edwards’ mission in Stockbridge was beset by troubles. But in some ways it does not matter which argument you make; so long as you see the big picture that Edwards saw.

Edwards had no doubt that God would enlighten every nation with the gospel. But he never made God’s will contingent on the glory of a nation. He was neither nationalistic nor parochial. In fact, when Edwards mentioned both Britain and New England’s gospel blessings he meant it as a warning, not self congratulation. God had used British colonists to bring revival among the Indians; Edwards’ friend David Brainerd was a witness and an instrument of that. The victory of Catholic forces in America would have been a crushing blow to Edwards and it would have endangered his life. But his life and writings indicate that his faith was secure from such a blow.

As a British subject and an American colonist, Edwards was in the world and engaged with it. He scoured current events for signs that God’s good news was progressing in the world. He was a spiritual man but he did not despise the practical. He advocated for political situations that furthered the cause of the gospel. He knew his history; God had used empires and rulers to spread his kingdom before. But he was not of the world. The fight was spiritual. Even if his nation fell he knew that God’s people, kingdom, and glory never would.

See also Jonathan Edwards: The Interrupted Theologian

References

• George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press), 378.
• See: David W Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, ed. Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).
• See: Gerald R McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
• ibid., 49.
• Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. John F. Wilson, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 460.
• Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Paice, 24/2/1752, in Jonathan Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S Claghorn, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Volume 16 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
• ibid.
• This comment rests on the painstaking analysis by McDermott in his book cited above.

 

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