Includes bibliographical references (p. [515]-600) and index.

A time to be born -- The overwhelming question -- The Pilgrim's Progress -- The harmony of all knowledge -- Anxieties -- "A low, sunk estate and condition" -- On Solomon Stoddard's stage -- And on a wider stage -- The mighty works of God and of Satan -- The politics of the Kingdom -- "A city set on a hill" -- God "will revive the flame again, even in the darkest times" -- The hands of God and the hand of Christ -- "He that is not with us is against us" -- Heavenly Elysium -- Conservative revolutionary -- A house divided -- A model town no more -- Colonial wars -- Thy will be done -- I am born to be a man of strife -- The crucible -- The mission -- Frontier struggles -- Wartice -- Against an "almost inconceivably pernicious" doctrine -- Original sin "in this happy age of light and liberty" -- Challenging the presumptions of the Age -- The unfinished masterworks -- The transitory and the enduring.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is a towering figure in American history. A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", he ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the 18th century. In this biography, Jonathan Edwards emerges as both a great American and a brilliant Christian. George Marsden evokes the world of colonial New England in which Edwards was reared - a frontier civilization at the centre of a conflict between Native Americans, French Catholics and English Protestants. Drawing on the available sources, Marsden demonstrates how these cultural and religious battles shaped Edwards's life and thought. Marsden reveals Edwards as a complex thinker and human being who struggled to reconcile his Puritan heritage with the secular, modern world emerging out of the Enlightenment. In this, Edwards's life anticipated the deep contradictions of American culture.