Preface

Two Men, A Shared Vision

was from my youth somewhat sober, and inclined rather to melancholy than the contrary extreme.” You have to figure that a book that starts with this line is going to be either very good or very bad. ’s diary, as edited by the eminent Jonathan Edwards, stands tall among the spiritual autobiographies of any generation, and particularly among the New World colonists. Edwards’ most popular work, it has never been out of print since its publication in 1749. The diaries are intensely per- sonal; they weren’t written for publication. In his last days Brainerd talked of destroying the extant writings, but instead entrusted them to Jonathan Ed- wards, whose generous family had taken Brainerd in, providing what we might call hospice care.

vii If not for Edwards, we might not know of Brainerd: either his internal bat- tles, both spiritual and temperamental, or of his work among the American Indians in three colonies. Brainerd was the sixth of nine children born to a legislator, Hezekiah Brainerd. But his father died when he was nine, and his mother when he was fourteen. David was pathetically sickly during his life, and died torturously of tuberculosis (then called consumption) at age twenty-nine. Without Edwards, he might only be a footnote in history books, marked only for having created a stir while studying theology at Yale, an “inci- dent” that changed the course of his career and perhaps the face of American aca- demia. To understand the import of that incident, consider the colonial times in whichbothBrainerdandEdwardslived... In 1700 the total European population in all the American colonies was only 250,000, and ninety-one thousand of these settlers lived in New England. By 1775, the population of the colonies had increased almost ten-fold, to two and a half million. In New England, this dramatic growth strained the values, laws, the very society, which was defined and designed in the light of Puritan Christianity. Puritan. It is a distorted word today, having come to refer largely to sexual mores that should more honestly be credited to Victorians. Puritan values were about strong families, ethical and moral behavior, and a strong work ethic, and their laws codified the behaviors that were expected of a godly people. While the law can, at least for a time, influence behavior, it cannot guarantee that the hearts of the citizens are righteous. It was no different in New England in the 1700s. A good portion of the early settlers came to New England to escape religious persecution. Their faith was vital and personal. After all, nominal faith is unimag- inable in a persecuted church. But in time, the Puritans were no longer the perse- cuted church; instead, they had become the established church, which can easily become lukewarm in faith. But in the 1730s and ’40s, revival swept through the colonies. Jonathan Ed- wards is inseparably linked with this movement, called the Great Awakening. A graduate of Yale, he had succeeded his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, as pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Stoddard had been a very popular minister, partially because he had relaxed church member- ship and sacramental requirements, effectively removing the necessity for an indi- vidual, personal spiritual experience with Jesus Christ. This policy, although it could be argued as necessary for a society that defined itself in Christian terms, ultimately served to lead people away from faith, not toward it. Edwards, on the other hand, understood, both from personal experience and from his studies, that God was knowable, and that only in a personal relationship

viii would true “religion” be found. In 1734, he preached a series of sermons on justi- fication by faith, and by the end of that year, the spark of revival had been lit in Northampton. Revival had been occurring already in ,through the work of Theo- dore Frelinghuysen and , encouraging people out of their spiri- tual lethargy. The message of revival was this: “Outward morality is not enough for salvation. An inward change is necessary.”This message is very familiar to the American Protestant ear today, but it was a fresh word to people who had de- pended on their morality, their outward actions, and their conformation to “Christian” behavior, to secure their place in God’s kingdom. From Northampton, revival rippled into neighboring Connecticut. Edwards continued his preaching and God continued blessing. In 1740, the Awakening ex- ploded through the work of Anglican , who held a six-week evangelistic tour of New England, including a stop at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut. 1740 was the year that Brainerd, as a student at Yale, started keeping a dated diary. TheLifeandDiarystarts with his summation of his childhood and youth, in- cluding an interesting account of his cerebral quarrels with God and the Christian message. It also describes his conversion experience at age twenty-one, on July 12, 1739, which left him replete with “joy unspeakable” that transported him to “a new world.” That September, just a few months later, he entered Yale to study theology. With Whitefield as a guest preacher, and later Gilbert Tennent and others, the Yale student body, more than the faculty, was abuzz with religious fervor. At the (September) 1741 graduation, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon titled “Distinguishing Marks of a Workof the True Spirit,” in which he, though wary of emotional displays, supported the importance of a vibrant, personal faith. That winter, in his third year of studies and at the top of his class despite clear symptoms of tuberculosis, Brainerd was dramatically expelled from Yale—the exaggerated result of his making a private comment to two or three good friends, that a university tutor named Mr. Whittesley,spiritually had “no more grace than this chair.” The overheard comment and overblown affair proved so painful and shameful to Brainerd that in his last days he demanded that his diaries from 1741 through April 1742 be destroyed. His dismissal from Yale influenced his career more than might be obvious to us today.Without a degree from Harvard, Yale, or a European college, traditional pastoral work in New England was nearly impossible (though less restricted in New York and more distant colonies). However, with support from clergy in

ix sympathy with the Great Awakening, Brainerd briefly served a church on Long Is- land, and then accepted a call to be a missionary to the Indian community. He served under the auspices of the Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge: his initial assignment was to serve outside of Stockbridge, Massachu- setts (in the far western reaches of the colony, on the New York border) with the Housatonic people. Working with a translator and an older missionary,he started to learn the language and translate some prayer-psalms. In September 1743, Brainerd returned to Yale to what would have been his graduation (presumably with high honors). This appears to be when Edwards personally met him, discussing “the incident” and being impressed with Brain- erd’s attitude and deportment. The next spring, Brainerd was transferred to serve “a number of Indians on [the] in ,” and a year later, in June 1745, was trans- ferred again, this time to Crossweeksung, New Jersey. That winter he realized that some of the British were accusing him of being papist and “stirring up the In- dians against the English.” In examining his conscience, he came up with no ac- count of guilt . . .

. . .unless it was my attempting sometimes to vindicate the rights of the Indians, and complaining of the horrid practice of making the In- dians drunk, and then cheating them out of their lands and other prop- erties . . . and possibly on one occasion doing so “with too much warmth of spirit” and not enough humility. In 1746, when this particular Delaware Indian group, many of them now Christians, moved, Brainerd went with them, to Cranberry, New Jer- sey, where he lived until his illness left him unable to function. It’s estimated that in his short life, despite chronic sickness, he rode three thousand miles on horseback. And when his illness finally became too severe, he eventually rode (yes, by horse) to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he lived in the Edwards household for the last five months of his life, continually at the brink of death, which he sometimes begged for. It’s not clear that Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd had spent much time in each other’s company until these final months. But it’s clear that Edwards was impressed with how the saint died: slowly, agonizingly, yet as a man eager to glo- rify his God in death as in life. Finally,Brainerd was released from his suffering on October 9, 1747, just days after his brother John came to his bedside. (John would continue David’s work among the Indians.) David’s primary care-giver in those last months was Edwards’ seventeen- year-old daughter Jerusha, who also died of illness that next winter. In editorial

x notes at the end of the diary,Edward mentions a strong spiritual, if not romantic bond between them, quoting David as saying to her, in his last week: “If I had thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you . . .” Edwards’ funeral sermon for David Brainerd, based on 2 Corinthians 5:8, was quickly published in Boston, under the title, “True Saints, When Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord.” After Brainerd’s death, Edwards’ own career took an unexpected turn. In 1750 his Northampton congregation asked him to resign, because he wanted to officially change the policy of “open admission” to the sacraments begun by his grandfather. Edwards insisted that “only persons who had made a profession of faith could be admitted to the Lord’s Supper.”After a few lean months of unem- ployment, Edwards became pastor to settlers and missionary to Indian peoples living near Stockbridge, Massachusetts—continuing Brainerd’s earlier work. In 1757, Edwards was chosen president of the relatively new College of New Jersey, which became Princeton—a university that some claim was founded as a result of dissatisfaction over Yale’s expulsion of Brainerd. Edwards had been in Princeton for only months when he chose to be inoculated against smallpox, which had broken out in the region. Tragically, Edwards died from vaccination- related complications on March 22, 1758, at the young age of fifty-five. A word about the texts. In 1749, two years after Brainerd’s death, Edwards published the edited LifeandDiaryofDavidBrainerd.Most of this volume is in- deed the personal diary of David Brainerd, which he wrote without intent of publication. In a third-person voice, Jonathan Edwards sometimes summarizes deleted entries or provides commentary, possibly intending to minimize Brain- erd’s emotional extremes. In addition to this private diary, Edwards referred to a work known as Brain- erd’s Journal. This is a work that Brainerd wrote (in two parts, over one year) as a document of accountability for his mission board. In editing the diary of that year (June 1745–June 1746), Edwards notes that he deleted significant amounts of ma- terial and, rather, refers the reader to the “journal” entry for a particular day. As one might expect, the “journal,” as an employee report, seems to include less commentary on Brainerd’s emotional, spiritual, and physical vicissitudes and more details of his interactions with the Indians. (Some of these observations may possibly be jarring to a modern reader). What makes Brainerd’s writing a time-tested classic? Like the psalmist, like notable pre-Reformation saints, Brainerd recorded bluntly in his diary his daily conversations with God—his chief confidant. Weare spiritually blessed that in his

xi solitary hours he chose the exercise the discipline of journaling, which often re- counts his spiritual need and insecurities, his reliance on, and then gratitude for, God’s provision and grace. Even he understood the value of his record. A month before he died, he noted: I proceeded further in reading my old private writings and found . . . I could not but rejoice and bless God for what passed long ago, which without writing had been entirely lost. His personal struggles prompt us to turn to God in our weakness—spiritual and temperamental and also physical. His faithfulness to his ministry call, even in the midst of sickness and physical suffering, has inspired generations of Christian workers, including William Carey and . The hardship Brainerd struggled with was sometimes envi- ronmental:theharshnessofwinter,orsometimesthe“wantofsuitablefood...I am forced to go or send ten or fifteen miles for all the bread I eat”—and this in the heat of summer. One of his favorite sermon texts was John 7:37: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” In these diary pages you’ll discover one often-parched man who, day after day, chose to seek and find relief at the living fountain of his Lord. Brainerd’s diary will certainly remain a classic, as a well-composed testimony of a man of action who also maintained a fervent and disciplined prayer life.

Reader’s Note TheLifeand Diary of David Brainerd contains a book within a book: Jonathan Ed- wards presents and discusses the writings of David Brainerd. The writings of Jona- than Edwards are typeset across the full width of the page; the writings of DavidBrainerdaresetindented.

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