The only son in a family of eleven children, he entered Yale in September, when he was not yet thirteen and graduated four years later as valedictorian. He received his Masters three years later. As a youth, Edwards was unable to accept the Calvinist sovereignty of God.

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Works published by Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan was the fifth child and only son among 11 children; he grew up in an atmosphere of Puritan piety, affection, and learning. After a rigorous schooling at home, he entered Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of He was graduated in but remained at New Haven for two years, studying divinity. After a brief New York pastorate —23 , he received the M. In the same year, he married Sarah Pierrepont, who combined a deep, often ecstatic, piety with personal winsomeness and practical good sense. To them were born 11 children.
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Jonathan Edwards — is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian. His work as a whole is an expression of two themes — the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness. Edwards' second theme is articulated in accounts of God's end in creation, and of the nature of true virtue and true beauty. God creates in order to manifest a holiness which consists in a benevolence which alone is truly beautiful. Genuine human virtue is an imitation of divine benevolence and all finite beauty is an image of divine loveliness. Edwards' projected History of Redemption would have drawn these themes together, for it is in his redemptive work in history that God's sovereignty, holiness, and beauty are most clearly exhibited. Edwards was born into a family of prominent Congregational ministers in East Windsor, Connecticut in Edwards' metaphysics, however, appears more strongly influenced by Malebranche and, to a lesser extent, the Cambridge Platonists, and bears little resemblance to Locke's.
At age 14, Jonathan Edwards, already a student at Yale, read philosopher John Locke with more delight "than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold, from some newly discovered treasure. He also was a young man with profound spiritual sensitivities. At age 17, after a period of distress, he said holiness was revealed to him as a ravishing, divine beauty.