Edwards, Jonathan, the younger, 1745–1801, American theologian, b. Northampton, Mass., grad. College of New Jersey (now Princeton), 1765; son of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). His career in some ways paralleled that of his famous father. After serving as pastor of a New Haven church from 1769 to 1795, he was dismissed for opposing the Half-Way Covenant. Until 1799 he was pastor at Colebrook, Conn. Edwards was then made president of Union College at Schenectady, N.Y., but he died before he could make much impression on the college. He edited some of his father's works and generally held to his doctrines, although in On the Necessity of the Atonement the younger Edwards expounded a theory of the Atonement that was more liberal and more popular than his father's theory.
See his works (2 vol., 1842) ed. by his grandson, T. Edwards.
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