Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and The Religious Affections

Abstract

In this paper I want to take a look at John Locke’s influence on Jonathan Edwards’ The Religious Affections (1748). When Edwards was a teenage student at Yale College he came across a copy of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Some have thought that this reaction was a mere adolescent infatuation on Edwards’ part. But Edwards' first biographer, Samuel Hopkins, famously captured Jonathan's lifelong attitude to that book...