The following is the result of research I have been doing for an article I am writing for an Encyclopedia on Jonathan Edwards that will be published later this year by Eerdmans. All the quotes are from the 26 volume series of The Works of Jonathan Edwards published by Yale University Press (1957-2008). To make reading easier I have ended the quotes simply with the volume number and page number (i.e., 25:146 means volume 26, page 146).
I should also that my church, Byfield Parish in Georgetown MA, has invited Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema, Executive Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center and Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale Divinity School, and Dr. Rhys Bezzant, Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Ridley University, Melbourne, Australia and author of Jonathan Edwards and the Church, to speak to us on Edwards on Saturday, May 3 from 10:00am-2:00pm. If you are in the area and would like to attend this free seminar, you can register here.
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Edwards defined the family as “a little church” in which parents responsibly, intentionally, consistently, and strictly “promote religion” for the good of the church and the good of society. Edwards saw the family as patterned after “family order” of the trinity (25:146) as the primary building block of community for both Church and society. For church and society to work as God intended, families needed to be healthy and functioning well.
The idea of the family as a microcosm of the church was a belief that Edwards held throughout his life. This idea is seen in one of his earliest extant sermons, Living to Christ, a sermon preached during Edwards New York pastorate in 1722-23,
A Christian family is as it were a little church and commonwealth by itself, and the head of the family has more advantage in his little community to promote religion than ministers have in congregation, and magistrates in the commonwealth, they being always with them and having them at continual command, and having always opportunities of instructing them (10:577).
In his Farewell Sermon marking the end of his pastorate at Northampton more than 27 years later in 1750 Edwards reasserts this idea affirming it as a consistent thought throughout his career. “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules” (25:484).
Given the aforementioned quotes, it is little wonder that Edwards had very high expectations for parents. Fifty times throughout his sermon corpus, Edwards spoke directly to “heads of families.” Edwards saw “the due regulation” of families as “in some respects, of much greater importance” than the regulation of the congregation (25:484). Edwards was convinced that good parenting was essential to curtail societal ills and to promote the continued growth of the church saying “family education and order are some of the chief of the means of grace. If these fail, all other means are like to prove ineffectual. If these are duly maintained, all the means of grace will be like to prosper and be successful” (25:484).
It is no surprise that for Edwards the first responsibility for heads of families was to teach and model the Christian faith to their children. In The Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families (1741), a lecture addressed to parents in a private meeting, Edwards exhorted them saying, “Now God is especially calling you to be much in instructing your children and taking care of the good of their souls” (22:453). In The Dangers of decline (1730), Edwards said that parents should take great “care and pains in instructing children and instilling principles of religion into ’em.” Edwards believed that strict “care to keep up a constant attendance on family worship in the members of the family” (17:92) was an essential duty of parents. Edwards believed that, “If parents did what they might do this way, multitudes of souls might be saved by their means, and a great increase and addition might be made to the kingdom of Jesus Christ” (10:577).
Along with this, Edwards saw parents as key to bringing and cultivating revival, asserting in The Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families that, “After a dead time in religion, ’tis very requisite that religion should revive in heads of families and those that have the care of children, in order to a people’s being fitted for so great a privilege as to have God remarkably dwelling among them” (22:451).
Teaching the Christian faith went part and parcel with the responsibility for maintaining order in the home. Edwards saw the importance of parents in providing and maintaining stability in the family; as in his sermon, The State of Public Affairs (1731/32), where he writes,
We may conceive of the reason of the thing sometimes by considering what confusion it would make in a family to have the heads and governors of it changed once in two or three years. It would be the way utterly to ruin the children and servants of a family. A land’s often changing its princes or having many princes tends to its mischief no less than for a family often to be changing its heads (17:354).
Central to this stability was making sure that children were not engaging in practices that undermined their spiritual health or the health of the church and the community at large. When the family functioned well, it served as a picture of what heaven would be like, as for example in They Sing a New Sing (1740) where he says, “So far therefore as we sing this song on earth, so much shall we have the prelibations of heaven. In this way we shall have something of heaven in our closets and in our families” (22:241).
When the children and youth of Northampton were taking part in company and activities “of an evil and corrupt tendency” Edwards was not averse to address them directly as their spiritual father as he did in Youth Is Like a Flower That Is Cut Down (1748) where Edwards takes issue with
not only the gross acts of lasciviousness, but {also} such liberties as naturally tend to stir up lust: that shameful lascivious custom of handling women’s breasts, and the different sexes lying in beds together— the custom of frolicking, as it is called; [and] of the so general custom of being absent from family prayer and being out very late in the night, and those of different sexes sitting up great part of the night together (22:333).
But Edwards ultimately placed the blame for such behavior at the feet of the parents. In Heeding the Word and Losing It (1733/34) Edwards addressed parents saying, “If you have in any measure maintained the authority that belongs to a head of a family, ’tis in your power to restrain your children from such disorders as I speak of, on sabbath evenings and lecture days. The ordering of such things as these properly belongs to heads of families” (19:54-55). In Heeding the Word, and Losing It, Edwards warns parents against making the same mistake Eli did with his sons saying if they failed to act to restrain their children, “your children indeed will be guilty, but guilt will also lie at your doors. Hophi and Phinehas were guilty, but those terrible curses that were entailed to Eli’s family were chiefly for Eli’s sin in not restraining them.” He reaffirms this same warning in the Farewell sermon saying, “Take heed that it ben’t with any of you as it was with Eli of old, who reproved his children, but restrained them not; and that by this means you do not bring the like curse on your families, as he did on his” (25:484).
If parents felt that their own parents had been too strict, Edwards made this clear in Sin and Wickedness Bring Calamity and Misery on a People (1729) saying, “Parents say that their forefathers were too strict, that they used to lay too great restraints upon their children, that they were too severe in governing of ’em. But if it was so, parents nowadays err much more on the other extreme: they give their children too vast liberties” (14:503).
Learning To Be Full Of Grace And Truth. 
Love this! Thanks for sharing this!
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