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Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Kenneth P. Minkema
Kenneth P. Minkema
Affiliation:
Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University.
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Extract

In his Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God, an account of the awakening of 1734–35 in his church at Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards excitedly reported a considerable number of old persons among the several hundred converts. “I suppose,” he wrote, “there were … more than twenty of them above fifty, and about ten of them above sixty, and two of them above seventy years of age.” Edwards's evident self-satisfaction stemmed from the widespread belief that conversion among the elderly was unusual. “It has been a thing heretofore rarely to be heard of,” he noted, “that any were converted past middle age; but now we have the same ground to think that many such have in this time been savingly changed, as that others have been so in more early years.”

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Information
Church History , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 674 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2001

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