Did Jonathan Edwards Undermine Calvinism?
January 31, 2021
Roger E. Olson
Did Jonathan Edwards Undermine Calvinism?
Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the greatest Puritan theologian and a passionate Calvinist, “speaks today” through Calvinist leaders like John Piper even though he has been dead for hundreds of years. Edwards was born in Massachusetts in 1703 (the same year John Wesley was born in England) and died in New Jersey in 1758—just after becoming president of the College of New Jersey now known as Princeton University. He died tragically from a smallpox vaccination. Anyone who knows John Piper, as I do, knows that he reveres Edwards for his great intellect, deep spirituality, and biblical fidelity. Edwards speaks through Piper, not supernaturally, of course, but in the fact that Piper has always praised and parroted Edwards’s ideas even if in his own words.