It was frightening. Good Christians were laughing hysterically or weeping fitfully, throwing themselves on the floor.

Tricentennial celebration: Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703. This year marks the 300th birthday of this influential preacher.

They were confronting their friends and neighbors with the need to get right with God. They claimed the Spirit of God was filling them, controlling them, inspiring them--but it all seemed far too, well, emotional for the fine folks of Massachusetts.

The Great Awakening might have remained an oddity, on the fringes of the American experience, if it weren't for a pastor named Jonathan Edwards. This scholar's openness and keen analysis made sense of this movement of the Spirit, and as a result, even more lives were changed. In the process, an emerging nation found its soul.

The year was 1740, and colonists from Savannah to Boston were enthralled by the gifted preaching of George Whitefield, an English cleric making his way through America on horseback. Many churches turned him away, fearing his theatricality and emotionalism. That just sent Whitefield out to the fields and streets, where even more people could hear him. It was estimated that 25,000 flocked to one open-air service to hear him preach. (Ben Franklin doubted that statistic, but one day he tested it out on the streets of Philadelphia. As Whitefield preached from the courthouse steps, Franklin could hear him a block away. Calculating the distance and the amount of space each person would require, he concluded that up to 30,000 could hear this orator at one time.)

If that many people are spiritually aroused about something, there must be something wrong with it. That was the opinion of many critics. To be sure, Whitefield was a curiosity, and a showman to some extent. But Whitefield's script was pure gospel: "You must be born again." He said this to church members, convinced that churches were packed with "Christians" who had really never met God. Whitefield brought people the same message that had been delivered by Luther and Wycliffe and Francis and Jesus himself: God wants to know you; he wants to change your life. This has always been viewed as dangerous information by those with vested interests. If Christianity equals respectability, then the appeal to common folks is scandalous--and their unfettered emotional response is even worse.

Jonathan Edwards knew better. He was as respectable as one could get, well-bred and well-trained. Son of a minister, grandson of another, he attended Yale Divinity School (even before it was called that) and succeeded his famous grandfather as pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards preached brilliantly. His fertile mind studied philosophy and science as well as theology. Some have claimed he was possibly the smartest man ever in America.

The Surprising Work of God
When Whitefield's revival came galloping up the coast, Edwards welcomed it. He had seen this sort of thing before. Six years earlier his own church had been swept by an outpouring of God's Spirit. In A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, Edwards analyzed the 1734-35 revival that swept through Northampton and surrounding towns. It had started with "a very unusual flexibleness, and yielding to advice, in our young people." Soon there was "a remarkable religious concern" throughout the region. The untimely death of a young man in early 1734 caused many to think about their eternal destiny, and a flood of personal conversions followed.