The Great Awakening: Spiritual Revival in Colonial America | Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God...

Iain Murray - Jonathan Edwards: The Life, The Man, The Legacy
This biography lecture on the life of 18th century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, was given by historian Iain Murray.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhZI-pOW36k

Images
1. Jonathan Edwards 'Spiritual delight in God arises chiefly from HIS beauty and perfection, not from the blessings He gives us.'
2. Jonathan Edwards 'Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.'
3. Henry Augustus Loop, Jonathan Edwards, oil on canvas
4. Edwards History Redemption

Background from {[https://connecticuthistory.org/connecticut-origins-shape-new-light-luminary-jonathan-edwards/]}
Connecticut Origins Shape New Light Luminary Jonathan Edwards
October 5, 2016 • Bolton, Jonathan Edwards, Belief, Education, South Windsor
By Kenneth Minkema
Jonathan Edwards, arguably one of the most significant religious figures in US history, was a theologian, philosopher, pastor, revivalist, educator, and missionary. An adherent of Reformed Puritan theology, he engaged the new methods and approaches of the Enlightenment, incorporating them in innovative ways into his inherited religious worldview.
Edwards spent most of his career as a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts. There, he participated in two major religious revivals, including the Great Awakening (a transatlantic evangelical movement that swept the British-American colonies in the 1740s). He became the chief theorist and apologist for revivalism and a fountainhead of the new evangelicalism. Dismissed in 1750 from Northampton after a bitter, protracted controversy over qualifications for church membership, he assumed the post of missionary to Native Americans at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the following year. In 1757 he received a call to become the president of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. He held this position for only a few months before dying on March 22, 1758, following a bad reaction to a smallpox inoculation.

Edwards’ Formative Years in Connecticut
Though most of his mature life was spent in Massachusetts, Edwards was a Connecticut native. He was born on October 5, 1703, in Windsor Farms (present day South Windsor), on the east side of the Connecticut River across from Windsor. His parents were Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards. Timothy was the minister of Windsor Farms, where he served from 1694 to 1758. The couple had 11 children: 10 daughters and one son.
The community and family in which Edwards grew up shaped his education, temperament, and spiritual life. His father, a gifted leader, had a reputation as a powerful preacher who had seen several periods of religious “stirs” in his congregation. Edwards’ mother and his many sisters were known for their intelligence, learning, and wit. In their home, where Timothy ran a preparatory school for local boys, Jonathan and his sisters were trained in classical learning.
Edwards matriculated in 1716 in the Connecticut Collegiate School. At that time, the college was separated into three locations: Saybrook, New Haven, and Wethersfield. For several years Edwards attended the Wethersfield branch under the tutelage of his kinsman Elisha Williams. The young Edwards also attended the town’s church, where his uncle, Stephen Mix, was the minister. By 1718, negotiations to find a single, central location for the college had been completed and the New Haven site was chosen along with a new name, Yale College, after a benefactor. Students from the other branches arrived, but Edwards and several others, displeased with their tutor, returned temporarily to Wethersfield. It was not until his senior year that Edwards actually resided in New Haven. During this time, no doubt, he became more acquainted with Sarah Pierpont, daughter of the Reverend James Pierpont. Eventually, Jonathan and Sarah would marry and raise 11 children.

As Advocate of Great Awakening, Edwards Stirs Debate
After completing his baccalaureate work at Yale College, Edwards began graduate studies. During this period, he preached for a short time to a small Presbyterian congregation in New York City. Upon completing his master’s degree in 1723, Edwards, through the machinations of his father, became the pastor of the newly formed church in Bolton, Connecticut. The town was a small agricultural community and suited neither Edwards’ ambitions nor, apparently, his idea of a harmonious church. He quickly left this post to become a tutor at Yale College, where he served for two years. Here, Edwards had the opportunity to arrange and plunge into the college library, which included sizable donations of titles from England. He also preached occasionally for the church in Glastonbury.
In 1726, Edwards was called to Northampton as an assistant to his grandfather, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, and upon Stoddard’s death three years later became senior minister. During his time in Northampton, Edwards established himself as a revivalist, theologian, and member of the transatlantic evangelical network. He frequently returned to Connecticut, however, to visit family at Windsor Farms and elsewhere. He also came in professional capacities, as a preacher and ecclesiastical advisor, mostly in the context of the Great Awakening. In October 1740, when the famous itinerant preacher George Whitefield was visiting New England, Edwards conducted him from Northampton to his father’s house in Windsor Farms. It was as an invited guest preacher that Edwards delivered what has become the most famous sermon in US history, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in July 1741 in Enfield (then a part of Massachusetts but transferred in 1749 to Connecticut).
Edwards’ involvement in the Great Awakening, and his role as an apologist for it as “a work of the Spirit of God,” embroiled him in controversy. The revivals had caused a split between supporters and opponents, known, respectively, as New Lights and Old Lights. Yale College had in 1741 denounced not only Whitefield but also the revivals generally. In September of that year Yale College asked Edwards to deliver the commencement address hoping he would be similarly dismissive. Instead, his address, “The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God,” criticized those who failed to support the revivals.

Extremes within Movement Prompt Reassessment
One of the most controversial aspects of the Great Awakening was when itinerant New Light preachers declared that other ministers were unconverted and therefore not worthy of their office. Perhaps the wildest of the New Lights was James Davenport, a New Haven native who was pastor of a church in Long Island and made preaching tours through Connecticut. Typically, he would walk through the streets of a town, head thrown back, shouting at the top of his lungs. In early 1743, in New London, he even supervised bonfires of the vanities, during which he exhorted townspeople to burn books and clothes.
It was as the head of a council of ministers to curb Davenport that Edwards traveled to New London in March 1743. Shortly thereafter, Davenport recanted his activities and views. Reflecting on episodes such as these, and within his own church, Edwards went on to write A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), in which he delineated the negative and positive “signs” of true vs. counterfeit religion.

Edwards’ Writings Influence 19th-century Reformers
After his dismissal from Northampton, Edwards cast about for a new post. He candidated at the backwoods hamlet of Canaan, Connecticut, preaching there in late 1750 and early 1751. Ultimately, however, he settled on the mission at Stockbridge, where he served the Mahicans and Mohawks living there, as well as a small English congregation. Edwards had been involved in the founding of the Stockbridge mission in the 1730s and had been an admirer of David Brainerd, a missionary to Indigenous people in New Jersey. As a student at Yale, Brainerd had been expelled for criticizing the spiritual state of one of the tutors. Edwards had supported Brainerd and opened his home to him, where he died of tuberculosis in 1747.
Even more, Edwards published Brainerd’s diary, The Life of David Brainerd (1749), which became a standard work for missionaries in the centuries following. It was in Stockbridge, however, that Edwards wrote many of the treatises—Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), The End for Which God Created the World, and The Nature of True Virtue (the latter two works published posthumously in 1765)—that secured his fame.
After his death, Edwards’ life and writings exercised a profound influence on American religious life. In western Connecticut in particular, many of the pulpits were filled by “New Divinity” men, preachers who adhered to Edwards’ views. A key figure was one of Edwards’ students, Joseph Bellamy, pastor of Bethlehem, who maintained a school for boys and young ministers-in-training in his home. Edwards’ thought was instrumental in 19th-century reform movements, such as the abolition of slavery. Though a slaveholder and defender of slavery himself, Edwards’ ethical thought was transformed by another of his disciples, Samuel Hopkins, into abolitionism that took early root in the late 1700s on into the 1800s. Through Bellamy, Hopkins, and many other followers, including Edwards own son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., the culture of Connecticut was deeply influenced by Edwards well into the 19th century.
Kenneth P. Minkema, PhD, is the Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University.'

FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerSGT Randell Rose[SGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Bernard WalkoSPC Nancy GreenePVT Mark Zehner Lt Col Charlie BrownSP5 Dennis Loberger SSG Robert Mark Odom 1LT Peter DustonSPC Woody Bullard

Slavery was the law of the land in much of New England well into the 19th century.
Indentured servants and slaves were a fact of life for much of humanity in the 18th century Capt Gregory Prickett.
1. Some slave owners were cruel since some people are cruel by nature. Many slave owners treated their slaves and indentured servants as extended family - this includes nurse-maids and those who worked primarily in the homes. Whether somebody had slaves is not an issue in those times. How he or she treated their slaves and indentured servants is the issue.
2. Slavery was common in Africa as warring tribes enslaved vanquished and captured, middle east - especially Ottoman empire, south America [similar to Africa - tribal warfare ...] and parts of asia.
3. Natives tend to be enslaved when captured from aborigines in Australia through the new world colonies.
4. Indentured servants dates back to serfs and fiefdoms.

It wasn't until the industrial revolution and the cotton gin, that slavery became much more gruesome in the southern cotton fields. Slaves were bought and sold as commodities instead of human beings - in Maryland and points south during the early to mid-19th century.
FYI PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SMSgt Dr. G. A. Thomas MSG Andrew White LTC Greg Henning LTC Bill Koski LTC John Shaw SGT (Join to see) SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. SFC Ralph E Kelley SMSgt Lawrence McCarter

I simply provided a summary Capt Gregory Prickett.
1. Morality is not a constant in any sense since morality is based on personal standards or lack of them barring any other foundation.
2. What is immoral to one group is too often moral to another from enslaving, to treating spouses and children as chattel, to lying, cheating, stealing, and killing.
3. My morality is founded on Judeo-Christian principles which I was inculcated in by my British expatriate parents who raised me as an agnostic. I spent a couple decades learning as much as I could about world history, the physical sciences, philosophy and the faiths of the world.
4. My morality is now founded on my faith as a Christian. The greatest commandment [part 2] is inspirational and always challenging. Love my neighbor as myself and treat the respectfully.[my summary]
5. I do not support slavery, indentured servanthood, or any other forced labor.
6. I do my best to research biographical and historical subjects and look for those with limited bias that are well footnoted.
FYI Lt Col Charlie Brown PVT Mark Zehner Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen MSgt Dave Hoffman SMSgt Dr. G. A. Thomas SMSgt Tom Burns SMSgt Mark Venzeio SMSgt David A Asbury SSgt Kelly D. SSgt Marian Mitchell SPC Michael Terrell SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D SFC Chuck Martinez SFC William Farrell CSM Charles Hayden

There is nothing inherently evil about being slave Capt Gregory Prickett.
1. As a Christian, I understand being a slave to Christ is an honor. Being a slave to passions is not usually a good thing for slaveholders, slaves or anybody else.
2. Judeo-Christian simply refers to traditions, perspectives, mores, etc. dating back to Hebrew ear in Egypt, Israel, through the period when church councils were formed to hammer out what was orthodox versus heretical.