Did Jonathan Edwards neglect his family?

What would prompt such a question as this? Is there well-known or newly discovered evidence that pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) — a leader of the First Great Awakening and widely considered America’s greatest theologian — neglected his family? Are there reasons to believe he had a troubled marriage with Sarah? Did his children turn out badly?

No. Rather, it’s likely that the only reason anyone would even pose the question arises from a short but famous remark by Samuel Hopkins (1721–1823), Edwards’s first biographer.

Behind the Study Door

Hopkins, who would later become an influential theologian in his own right, once lived in the Edwards home for six months to observe and learn from the renowned minister.

In The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (1764), Hopkins wrote that “he commonly spent thirteen hours every day in his study.” Hopkins passes immediately from the remark without so much as a word as to how Edwards spent that time. It is not hard to guess the general contours of those thirteen hours, given Edwards’s propensities and the extant sermon manuscripts and publications. Still, nowhere do we read of a routine schedule or specific details describing Edwards’s activities behind the door of his study.

That’s it. When people read Hopkins’s ten words through the lens of modern life, and then factor in time for sleeping, eating, and other matters, some conclude that Edwards must have neglected his family. Those familiar with Edwards also recall his daily four-mile round-trip visit on horseback to the Sawtooth hills west of Northampton, where he would dismount to meditate and pray while walking, as well as his habit of chopping wood for exercise. Adding it all up, even Edwards’s most loyal supporters can be prone to wonder if — as so many pastors have done — he sacrificed his family on the altar of ministry.

The title of Elisabeth Dodds’s insightful book on “the uncommon union” of Jonathan and Sarah — Marriage to a Difficult Man — doesn’t help dispel these suspicions, at least for those who know of the book but haven’t read it. But as we shall see, Dodds instead sheds a reassuring light on life in the Edwards home.

His Little Church

Readers of Edwards’s sermons on the subject of family life will find them biblically orthodox. It isn’t surprising that, from a contemporary perspective, Edwards’s instructions about the governance of a home may seem rather strict. But they were in harmony both with the Christian parental guidance of his day and the spirit of the biblical teaching on the family.

His favorite analogy of the family was that it was like “a little church.” He used the image in one of his earliest published sermons (1723) and again in his “Farewell Sermon” to the Northampton church 27 years later, saying, “A Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules.” As a church should be marked by love, Christ-centeredness, and biblical order, so, said Edwards, should be the home.

In his 1739 sermon “The Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families,” Edwards warned of the “great offense” to God “if heads of families are either God’s enemies or are cold and dull in religion.” He advocated for the practice of regular family worship and the responsibility of fathers to instruct their children in the ways of the Lord. And yet, all the instruction, regardless of how faithful to Scripture, “will have little effect unless example accompanies instructions.” Thus, Edwards was well aware of the importance of being a Christlike example in the home. But he also knew that no amount of modeling or teaching was sufficient apart from the work of the Spirit in the hearts of children. Therefore, he urged the parents to “earnest prayer” for their children: “You should travail for them.”

Perhaps you’ve heard of hypocritical pastors who failed to practice in private the orthodoxy they preached in public. Edwards, however, has never been counted among them, but rather is renowned for the general congruence between his life and preaching. So, let us look elsewhere.

Uncommon and Happy Union

Why did Elisabeth Dodds refer to Edwards as “a difficult man”? It wasn’t because he was a disagreeable man or a distant man. Rather, it was because “a genius is seldom an easy husband” (31).

“As a church should be marked by love, Christ-centeredness, and biblical order, so, said Edwards, should be the home.”

In fact, Dodds argues that Edwards’s devotion to and dependence upon Sarah was one of the reasons why he would have been no easy husband. According to Dodds, Edwards often invited Sarah to join him in his late afternoon rides into the woods. There he would pour out the contents of the day’s study and sermon preparation for her consideration or seek her input on some parish problem. Although the break from her heavy domestic duties and the opportunity to be outdoors provided some physical refreshment, Dodds concluded that sometimes Sarah “must also have been singularly drained” by such intense mental demands at the end of the day.

Before the third paragraph of her book, Dodds says of Jonathan, “He was in fact a tender lover and a father whose children seemed genuinely fond of him.” Still, living with a man of such “labyrinthine character” meant their marriage was not a “radiant idyll” (i). No marriage is, even for two people as godly and well-matched as the Edwardses.

Being a pastor’s wife — especially the wife of the only pastor in town — is often difficult. Sarah knew she was scrutinized every time she left the house, down to what she wore, how much money she spent, and how her children behaved. Jonathan was always underpaid, so money was always tight, and the financial pressures increased with the birth of each of their eleven children. Add the criticism Jonathan received (which also weighed heavily on Sarah) to the problems of the church, and you have a mix that would strain the bonds of any marriage.

Yet, to the end Jonathan and Sarah loved each other and enjoyed what can only be considered a happy marriage. In fact, on his deathbed — literally in the last moments of his life — Edwards’s final words included this message to his wife of thirty years, who had not yet made the move to Princeton where Edwards was the new president: “Give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever.”

Incidentally, Jonathan named his first child Sarah.

Three Meals a Day

When specifying the qualifications of an elder, the apostle Paul wrote, “He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive” (1 Timothy 3:4). Edwards met this qualification with flying colors, for each of his eleven children turned out well. Of course, pastors can (and have) kept their “children submissive” harshly and with dictatorial domination, but Edwards did it “with all dignity.” And to the point of this article, every good parent knows that neglected children seldom turn out well.

Abundant evidence proves that Edwards did not neglect his children at all. For starters, “Sarah could count on one hour a day when Edwards gave the family complete attention,” writes Dodds (49). “He made sure to save an hour at the close of each day to spend with the children.” How many of those who charge Edwards with neglect do this? Hopkins observed and wrote about this hour.

Moreover, the Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia reports that “when [the children] were old enough, he took them with him one at a time on his journeys. He often wrote his children when traveling alone” (87). Additionally, Edwards “had the idea, unusual in those times, that girls as well as boys should be educated. . . . The girls, tutored by their father at home, learned Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and penmanship” (Marriage to a Difficult Man, 50).

But Edwards placed the greatest emphasis on the commitment required for the spiritual instruction of his family. In his prize-winning biography, George Marsden writes that Edwards

began the day with private prayers followed by family prayers, by candlelight in winter. . . . Care for his children’s souls was, of course, his preeminent concern. In morning devotions he quizzed them on Scripture with questions appropriate to their ages. . . . Each meal was accompanied by household devotions. (133, 321)

Each meal! Note that this also implies that he ate three meals a day face-to-face with his family. If we knew nothing else of his interaction with his children, what we know of the gathering of his “little church” for family worship several times each day demolishes any suggestion that Edwards neglected his family.

‘Thirteen Hours Every Day’

Although the Edwardses lived in a two-story home, it was by no means large by today’s standards. Often as many as fifteen people lived there. That alone generated significant noise to interrupt a study in which there was no streaming music, white-noise device, or noise-canceling earphones to insulate Edwards from the distractions.

And though he was there thirteen hours a day (where else would he have gone to do his work?), he would have emerged as needed to quell a sibling dispute or address any other issue that required his attention. Moreover, the children were not forbidden to enter the study when necessary. After his evening hour with the children, Edwards retreated to his study for another hour or so. At bedtime Sarah would join him there, and they would close the day together in prayer.

So, when Hopkins writes that Edwards was in his study thirteen hours every day, it’s wrong to envision him there totally alone the entire time (that’s also where he counseled church members), completely disengaged from his family. In fact, from everything we know, he probably had more personal contact and interaction with his large family than almost any father does today.

Finally, although this article was specifically about Jonathan, I cannot close without emphasizing that much of the character and success of the Edwards children was, of course, attributable to the love, nurture, and training of the remarkable Sarah. And I’m sure Jonathan would agree. Together they truly had an “uncommon union,” and from it resulted an uncommon family.

Audio Transcript

Last time, we looked at how non-Christians fight for faith. We Christians also fight for faith. We fight for faith because the world and the flesh and the devil conspire to spiritually deaden us. They come at us with sleeping pills, with tranquilizers of relaxation, with the offer of a life filled by the hypnotic trance of digital amusements. And what Jesus wants us to see is that “faith and hope and love are the antidotes to the soporific effects of the world always trying to get you to go to sleep.” So how do we stay awake? And how do we fight to stay awake in the entertainment age? Here’s Pastor John, preaching in 2005 at an outdoor venue — a conference maybe. I’m not sure about the context, but you’ll hear the wind at times. Here is John Piper.

“Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11). Today is the 80th birthday of Dan Fuller, which doesn’t mean anything to most of you, but means a great deal to me because Dan Fuller was for me in 1968, ’69, ’70 and ’71 God’s instrument for turning my world upside down and opening my eyes to the Scriptures and the glory of God. So, I got on email yesterday, and I wrote him a long letter of appreciation and gratitude. And among the other things that I said, I said, “Dan, salvation is closer to you now than it was the day you believed, and every groan of your 80-year-old body is groaning closer to Jesus. Every heartbeat in your fragile old body is a heartbeat closer to the glory of Jesus Christ.”

I hope he takes heart in his 80-year-old frame. And I hope you take heart from knowing your salvation — which is the completion of your redemption, with a new body and the end of battling with sin — is closer today than it was yesterday. And every groaning of your aching body means, “I’m one groan closer to the glory that is arriving.”

Sleepwalking and Skydiving

Then the third thing he says in verse 11, in the first half of the verse, is this: “The hour has come for you to wake from sleep” (Romans 13:11). And you remember what we said about that? Most of the world that is not treasuring Jesus Christ as its supreme treasure is sleepwalking. Even though their life is very glitzy, it’s just bombarded every day with advertisements to say, “Do this, and you will live,” when in fact, it’s the devil wringing his hand, saying, “Do this, and you will go sound asleep” — sound asleep to what that sun is really saying today.

How many people in Mounds View do not hear the glory of God being declared from the heavens? Why? Because they spent all night watching television. They’ve saturated their lives with an entertainment mentality, and their spiritual eyes have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller until most people without Christ can’t see anything glorious in spiritual reality. And Paul says, “The day has come. This is not a time for sleeping. This is not a time for sleepwalking.”

It’s not a time for being like skydivers — this is like a parable of the world without Christ. The skydivers are leaping out their planes, and they are watching the air go at 120 miles an hour through their fingers, and feeling this is the apex of the thrill of life. But there’s just one problem: they have no parachutes. And the gravity that is pulling them inexorably toward what will happen in about a minute or two is called the wrath of God. Because Jesus said in John 3:36, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” And they think they’re so alive.

One of our great tasks is to so let the light of the gospel shine that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, eyes will wake up to the fact that day has come. Christ has come. The sun of righteousness has risen over Mounds View and over the Twin Cities. Wake up to the glory of your Savior, and believe him and enjoy him. Don’t be a sleepwalker. Don’t be a sleep-skydiver. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to get dressed. That’s what this text is about today. Get dressed. Take off your pajamas. Stop going to work in your pajamas.

Entering the War

So, we start now at verse 12. And what we’re finding here is that we’re being told what to wear as the light has come and what to do in this clothing. Romans 13:12: “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then cast off the works of darkness.” You see the logic? “Because it is day, so then . . .” These are pajamas. Cast off the works of pajamas. One way to define sin is pajamas. You should be embarrassed to go around sinning. I mean, who would go to work in his pajamas? But people go to work in the works of darkness every day when it’s day. Wake up! It’s day. The King of kings has come.

So, “cast off [take off] the works of darkness and put on” — and then he chooses a word that is surprising. I didn’t expect him to choose this word. It’s a word that signals that the Christian life is not just wakeful; it’s war. You see that word? The day is at hand; so then, take off your pajamas — that is, the works of darkness — “and put on the armor of light.” I mean, I would expect it to say, “Put on a shirt or a cloak” or “Dress well for work” or something. And he says, “Put on the armor of light.”

“The Christian life is not just wakeful; it’s war.”

So, out of the blue comes — I mean, we don’t just go from pajamas to clothes to armor; we go straight from pajamas to armor. What does that say about life? It says life is war. The Christian life is a battle — though God has been so merciful to give us a foretaste of heaven today, and we may wonder, how can we even think in terms of life as being war and a battle and darkness to be overcome?

Armor of Light

So, put off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Now, here’s my question: What is the armor of light, and what does putting it on mean? But let’s make the question a little broader. Verse 12 and verse 14 both used the words “put on.” Notice verse 14: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” So, now you’ve got two “put-ons”: put on the armor of light when you take off your pajamas of sin, and put on the Lord Jesus Christ. So, my question really is, What’s the relationship between putting on the armor of light and putting on the Lord Jesus Christ? What do those two things mean? And I think the answer is given in 1 Thessalonians 5:7–8.

So, if you want to go there with me, you can, or you can just listen. I read this two weeks ago because 1 Thessalonians 5:7–8 is the closest comparison in all of Paul’s writings to what we have here in Romans 13:12–14. When I read it, you’ll hear the relationship. So listen carefully to 1 Thessalonians 5:7–8:

For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on [now there it is: we have armor, so we know we’re in the same sphere of thought] the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

So, Paul mentions two pieces of armor: breastplate and helmet. We know there are more from Ephesians 6, but that’s all he’s dealing with here. We’ve got a breastplate to cover your heart and your will, and we’ve got a helmet to cover your brain, because those are the only three things the devil’s interested in. He wants your heart; he wants your will; he wants your brain — so get yourself covered good here and here. And he says there are three things that this armor stands for: faith, love, hope. Sound familiar? These three are the great ones — faith, hope, and love.

Staying Awake in a Sleepy World

So, now I come back to Romans 13:12, and see if this will help us. “So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” That is, let us put on faith, and let us put on hope, and let us put on love.

“Faith and hope and love are the antidotes to the soporific effects of the world.”

In this world of sleepwalking, the message is coming at you all day long — every day from television and from advertising and from all other kinds of things — to say, “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep with regard to God, with regard to Christ, with regard to the Bible.” And the less you want the Bible, the less you want Jesus, the less you want God, the more effective you know the sleeping pills of the world have been in your life. And what he’s saying here now is that faith and hope and love are the antidotes to the soporific effects of the world always trying to get you to go to sleep. So, combat that sleep-producing effect of the world by putting on faith and putting on hope and putting on love.

Here in Rome, Italy, near the heart of Roman Catholicism, it is not unusual to pass by one of the city’s countless Catholic churches and see people prostrate on the floor or on bended knee as the priest carries around the bread of the Eucharist.

This is a pinnacle moment in the life of Catholics. They claim to be worshiping the actual body and actual blood of Christ, which have taken over the elements of the bread. As The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) reads,

In the liturgy of the Mass we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by . . . genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord. The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration. (CCC, 1378)

In the Eucharist, they believe, Christ’s sacrificial work on the cross is made present, perpetuated, and reenacted. This understanding of the Eucharist depends on the Catholic Church’s teaching of transubstantiation, which has a central place in the Catholic faith.

What Is Transubstantiation?

The Catholic Church teaches that during the Eucharist, the body of Jesus Christ himself is truly eaten and his blood truly drunk. The bread becomes his actual body, and the wine his actual blood. The process of this change is called transubstantiation:

By the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation. (CCC, 1376)

To explain this phenomenon, Catholic theology presses Aristotelian philosophy into service. A distinction is made between substance and accidents. The substance of a thing is what that thing actually is, while accidents refer to incidental features that may have a certain appearance but can be withdrawn without altering the substance.

During the Eucharist, then, the substance of the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, while the accidents remain the same. The bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ, it is claimed, but maintain the appearance, texture, smell, and taste of bread and wine. The Catholic Church does not claim that this is a magical transformation, but that it is instead a sacramental mystery that is administered by those who have received the sacrament of order.

Where Did Transubstantiation Come From?

Like many aspects of Roman Catholic theology and practice, it is difficult to point to one definitive person or event to explain how transubstantiation entered into Catholic Church. It was more of a gradual development that then reached a decisive moment at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, where the teaching and belief were officially affirmed. However, by the second century, the view that the bread and wine are in some unspecified way the actual body and blood of Jesus had already surfaced. This is evidenced, for example, in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch (died around AD 108) and Justin Martyr (died AD 165), though their references to the nature of the Eucharist are somewhat ambiguous.

It is also true, however, that the early church fathers were countering certain gnostic teachings that claimed that Jesus never had a real human body but was only divine in nature. It was not possible, said the critics, that his body was present during the Eucharist. In response, some early church fathers insisted on the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament. Moreover, both Origen (185–254) and Cyprian (200–258) spoke of the sacrament as a eucharistic sacrifice, thus unhelpfully introducing sacrificial language into the Lord’s Supper. Ambrose of Milan (died 397) understood the Eucharist in these sacrificial terms, as did John Chrysostom (died 407). Jesus’s words in John 6:53–56 appeared to provide the biblical framework they needed to make their argument: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (verse 53).

Over the centuries, this belief developed until it eventually became official church dogma. It would not be without its challengers, however. Ratramnus (ninth century) and Berengarius (eleventh century) are notable examples of those who did not accept the claim that the substance of the bread and wine change in the Supper.

“To say that transubstantiation teaches that God is eaten is not an exaggeration or a misrepresentation.”

Transubstantiation would receive its greatest challenge in the sixteenth century from the Protestant Reformation. During the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which was the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church renewed with great enthusiasm its commitment to the doctrine, and thus to the conviction that during the Eucharist, God incarnate is indeed eaten. Matteo Al-Kalak — a professor of modern history at the University of Modena-Reggio in Italy — affirms that this concept is still fully embraced in a recent book titled Mangiare Dio: Una storia dell’eucarestia — Eating God: A History of the Eucharist. To say that transubstantiation teaches that God is eaten is not, then, an exaggeration or a misrepresentation.

His Sacrifice Cannot Be Repeated

The Protestant Reformation rightly rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. In the Old Testament, the priests entered the tabernacle repeatedly in order to offer blood sacrifices for the sins of God’s people. Christ, however, by means of his death and resurrection, entered into heaven and mediates on our behalf once and for all (Hebrews 7:27). His is not a sacrifice that needs to be or even can be repeated (Hebrews 9:11–28). It is sufficient. It is final (John 19:30). If, however, the bread and wine of the Eucharist indeed undergo a change of substance and become the real body and blood of Christ, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is neither sufficient nor final; instead, it is continually re-presented and made present. Thus, transubstantiation undermines the clear teachings of Scripture.

“Christ’s is not a sacrifice that needs to be or even can be repeated. It is sufficient. It is final.”

In response, Martin Luther (1483–1546) proposed a somewhat confused alternative with his doctrine of what came to be called consubstantiation. He taught that Christ’s body and blood are substantially present alongside the bread and wine. This was different from transubstantiation in that there was no change in the substance of the bread and wine itself. Luther’s theory, however, was susceptible to similar objections to those of transubstantiation. Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), another Reformer and contemporary of Luther, promoted the idea that the Lord’s Supper is symbolic and is solely a memorial of Christ’s work on the cross. Zwingli’s view is widely accepted in many evangelical circles today.

Transubstantiation receives its most helpful answer and alternative, however, in the classic Reformed view of the Lord’s Supper, deriving from John Calvin (1509–1564). The Reformed view promotes the understanding that while there is no change of substance in the sacrament, Jesus Christ is nonetheless present in a real way by means of his Holy Spirit. In observing the Lord’s Supper, Christ does not come down to the faithful in his body and blood; instead, the faithful are lifted up to him in spirit by the Holy Spirit.

As truly as the faithful eat in faith the bread and drink the wine, so they spiritually feed on Christ. The physical and spiritual are not merged, as they are in transubstantiation, nor are they completely separated. Instead, they are distinct but at the same time, through the ministry of the Spirit and the exercise of genuine faith, inseparable.