Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is America’s most famous theologian and perhaps its most famous philosopher too. He is an important and influential figure and worth seeking to understand for these reasons alone. We should think about Edwards for other reasons, however. He is the theologian par excellence of the Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR, or New Calvinist) movement. His influence is evident in the work of the leadership of the group, perhaps most notably John Piper. Importance and influence, however, do not necessarily equate to orthodoxy or to edification.
He was an American, Colonial, Congregationalist minister and theologian with some ties to American Presbyterianism. He is beloved by and influential in the YRR and New Calvinist movements for three reasons: (1) He advocated divine sovereignty clearly; (2) under his ministry in New England the colonies experienced what is now known as the First Great Awakening (1GA); and (3) he was a theologian of religious affections.
Religious Affections and the QIRE
Each of these features has connections to the YRR/New Calvinist movements. Let us start with the third. Inasmuch as the YRR/New Calvinist movements are products of the modern evangelical movement, they have roots in Pietism, which, in brief, was a reaction to the European and British state churches. The Pietists feared what they (and their theological offspring) called “dead orthodoxy”—that is, a mere confession of an orthodox faith without sufficient evidence of what people today call “lived experience.” The Pietists reacted to the perceived dead orthodoxy of the state churches by prioritizing religious experience above confessional orthodoxy—although the earlier generations of Pietists affirmed orthodoxy, the later Pietists abandoned it in favor of religious liberalism—and they sought perceptible evidence (e.g., religious and social activism) of new life and set up tests to measure, if you will, the temperature of one’s religious experience. Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affections (1746) did just that: It set up tests to measure the quality of religious experience. In Recovering the Reformed Confession (RRC), I characterized the Pietist desire for a certain quality of religious experience as the QIRE: the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience.
Traditional Reformed theology has always valued religious experience. After all, the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) begins with comfort or consolation:
What is your only comfort in life and in death?
That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who, with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins and redeemed me from all the power of the devil and so preserves me that, without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; indeed that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live for him.
The Heidelberg Catechism was not the product of the Pietists. It was the product of the system against which the Pietists rebelled. Reformed orthodoxy did not set religious experience against orthodoxy. Rather, it sought to marry the two and understood that genuine orthodoxy produces piety, and true piety reinforces orthodoxy. In Pietism and in Edwards, however, that marriage was seriously damaged so that piety was redefined almost solely in terms of personal religious experience and orthodoxy was damaged (Edwards) and eventually eclipsed (later Pietism). Nota bene: Pietism is not to be confused with piety. All the confessional Reformed Christians value a thorough and warm Reformed piety, but Pietism is another species altogether.
Edwards has been frequently described in the secondary literature as a student of John Locke (1632–1704), which he was until he was not. His theology and philosophy were ultimately influenced by Cambridge Platonism with serious consequences. His view of religious affections should be understood without considering his debt to the Platonists. For Edwards there is an ideal set of religious affections, and the Treatise on Religious Affections is an attempt to describe the ideal so that the Christian may measure himself. One simply finds no such thing in Scripture. Edwards’s approach to piety, in this respect, marked a departure from the older Reformed piety. Certainly the Reformed spoke about affections, but they did not speak about them as Edwards did because they were not Platonists. We may see some of the fruit of Edwards’s turn to religious experience in his narrative regarding Phebe Bartlet. His account of his wife’s religious experience is also troubling and illustrative of the QIRE.1
Pantheism, Theosis, and Justification
His debt to Platonism also affected his doctrines of God and justification. Charles Hodge described Edwards as a pantheist.2 This alone should give one pause, and yet it does not seem to have hindered his reputation among the YRR/New Calvinist enthusiasts. Pantheism is the doctrine that God is everything. As the Reformed churches understand Scripture, the distinction between the Creator and the creature is fundamental to Christian theology, piety, and practice. To confuse the two is a fundamental error that touches and corrupts everything else. This is not a Reformed peculiarity. This has always been a basic Christian conviction, even though the church before the Reformation was not always consistent with it. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) asserted it clearly at the beginning of his Summa Theologica even though, under the influence of Dionysius, he was not ultimately consistent with it. Before him Anselm affirmed it, and before him Augustine, and before him Athanasius. The Creator/creature distinction, which in RRC I called the categorical distinction, is basic to the biblical narrative: “In the beginning, God . . .” (Gen 1:1). You and I were formed from the dust of the earth.
One of Edwards’s revisions of Reformed theology was his fiddling with the doctrine of justification, the article of faith on which the church stands or falls. This is a notorious bone of contention among Edwards scholars. It is like an intractable and immovable rugby scrum, with neither side able to move the other. I am on the side of those who are suspicious of Edwards regarding justification. It is not that Edwards never said orthodox and orthodox-sounding things on justification. He did. The problem is that he said other things that are not easily squared with what the Reformed churches confess. Further, because of his pantheism, there is an underlying problem in his doctrine of justification, a doctrine of theosis (divinization).3
Michael McClymond described this problem in a 2003 essay. George Hunsinger, W. Robert Godfrey, and others have also raised questions about Edwards’s doctrine of justification.4 John Gerstner and Jonathan Neil Gerstner, Samuel Logan, Jeffrey Waddington, and Brooks Holifield have defended Edwards’s orthodoxy on justification.5 These defenses, by my lights, ultimately fail because they do not adequately address the problems that so many have observed, not only the profound underlying problem identified by McClymond but also what Hunsinger aptly described as his “dispositional” doctrine of justification. Gerald McDermott recognizes that Edwards does not fit neatly in a Protestant box on justification. He recognized that, according to Edwards, we are justified because we are sanctified. When Edwards’s defenders cite his use of the language of imputation, what they do not seem to grasp adequately is that there have long been versions of the doctrine of justification, going back to Gropper and Contarini in the sixteenth century, that have taught both justification by sanctification and by imputation.6 Luther addressed this in 1518–19 in his doctrine of double justification. We are justified coram Deo (before God) on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed and before men (coram hominibus) by our sanctification. The latter is really vindication, but Luther and the rest of the magisterial Protestants prioritized the forensic, the legal (imputation), over the realistic.
The Great Awakening(s)
My friend and colleague D. G. Hart regularly describes the 1GA as the First “Pretty Good Awakening.” The YRR/New Calvinist movements are invested in this episode in Colonial American religious history because they see it as a paradigm for what they hope to happen in our time, a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit during which many are brought to Christ by the faithful preaching of the gospel. In fact, the 1GA was a more complicated event, the outcome of which is not at all certain. As I documented in RRC, there is good reason to think that the 1GA did not lead to church growth but rather to the opposite. If a revival means that people are being brought to new life and true faith in Christ (That is the thing for which we hope, right?), then we should expect to see those converts uniting to the visible church, but there is evidence that did not happen. This should give one pause before making the 1GA a paradigm for any contemporary revival. Second, there other ways we do not want the 1GA to become a paradigm for any future revival. One of the darker aspects of the 1GA was the absolute certainty of its proponents that it was a work of the Spirit and that anyone, however orthodox he may be, who expressed any doubts or criticisms was to be, in contemporary parlance, cancelled and denounced as unregenerate. This was a regular feature of the rhetoric of the pro-1GA advocates in the eighteenth century, and it has unfortunately reappeared from time to time. Third, as it turns out, it is more difficult to distinguish the 1GA from the 2GA, assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding. There are organic links between the 1GA and 2GA, and there were enough manifest problems with the 2GA (e.g., the heresy and abuses of Charles Finney, the “Burned Over District,” and the like) that advocates of the 1GA should be cautious lest they bring with any future revival the same defects that gave us the 2GA.
Divine Sovereignty?
As I have already suggested, there were significant problems in Edwards’s doctrine of God, which necessarily sits at the headwaters of Reformed theology. What we say under the doctrine of God ripples or reverberates throughout the rest of our theology. So it was with Edwards. His account of the way God relates to the world raises questions about the orthodoxy of his view of divine sovereignty. On this, see the essays by Richard Muller linked below in the resources.
To be clear, this essay is not advocating that no one should read Edwards. Rather, it is an attempt to alert the reader to issues in Edwards’s theology and history of which he may not be aware. It is always good to read an author intelligently. Many laity, ruling elders, and pastors, however, may not be aware of these questions surrounding Edwards’s theology, piety, and practice since he has regularly been presented to us as a paradigm of Reformed orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Caveat lector: There is a good case to be made that he was neither but that rather, he was a creative, idiosyncratic, problematic, and (mostly) Congregational, Colonial theologian who should be read as such and not as a paradigm for Reformed theology, piety, and practice.
The reader should remember that the Reformed and Presbyterian churches do not confess Jonathan Edwards. We confess an understanding of God’s Word on certain important questions in the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Canons of Dort, and the Westminster Standards, among others. These are the baseline for the Reformed faith. We measure the orthodoxy of a theologian, whether from the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, by the Word as we confess it. When we read the Reformed confessions, we see no confusion on the doctrine of God, no doctrine of theosis, no ambiguity on justification, and no call for revival or extreme religious experiences of the sort that marked the QIRE during the 1GA and which continue to mark the Reformed Pietists of our day.
Notes
- See Jonathan Edwards, “Mrs. Edwards,” chap. XI in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 119–36.
- Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York, 1873), 2:219.
- I catalogued most of the literature on this question in RRC up to about 2007. See the following two footnotes in this essay.
- See George Hunsinger, “Dispositional Soteriology: Jonathan Edwards on Justification by Faith Alone,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004): 107–20; W. Robert Godfrey, “Jonathan Edwards and Authentic Spiritual Experience” (paper presented at Knowing the Mind of God: Papers Read at the 2003 Westminster Conference, London, 2004); Gary Steward, “Faith and Obedience in Jonathan Edwards’ Understanding of Justification by Faith Alone” (unpublished paper, 2006); Thomas A. Schafer, “Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith,” Church History 20 (1951): 55–67.
- See John H. Gerstner and Jonathan Neil Gerstner, “Edwardsean Preparation for Salvation,” Westminster Theological Journal 42 (1979): 5–71; Samuel T. Logan Jr., “The Doctrine of Justification in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,” Westminster Theological Journal 46 (1984): 26–52; Jeffrey C. Waddington, “Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Ambiguous and Somewhat Precarious’ Doctrine of Justification,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004): 357–72; Holifield, Theology in America, 119–20; Josh Moody, ed., Jonathan Edwards and Justification (Crossway, 2012).
- R. Scott Clark, “The Benefits of Christ: Double Justification in Protestant Theology Before the Westminster Assembly,” in The Faith Once Delivered: Celebrating the Legacy of Reformed Systematic Theology and the Westminster Assembly (Essays in Honor of Dr. Wayne Spear), ed. Anthony T. Selvaggio (P&R, 2007), 107–34.
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2020.
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R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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There is a part of Edward’s legacy you don’t comment on here. That is the distinction between natural and moral ability in the Freedom of the Will. This was the part that appealed to Andrew Fuller in Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, and which he used just justify the gospel offer and confute his Gillite opponents. Strict Baptists in England in the 18th and 19th and 20th century took Gill’s side. Spurgeon followed Fuller and joined the Baptist Union. The interesting thing was that under Lloyd Jones’ influence in the 1950’s and his rediscovery of Edwards the sort of baptists who now look to 9 Marks for guidance (all my ministers in Guildford Surrey had spells at Capitol Hill) but were then confessionally anti-Free Offer did a complete U-turn and embraced the idea that gospel preaching requires an offer. All linked to Iain Murray and the BoT taking on the legacy of Lloyd Jones.
Crisp and Bombaro were both students of the recently depated Paul Helm 30 years ago. It was the philosophical intricacies of Edwards that appeal(s)ed to them. Linda Zagzebski as well as Norman Fiering are much impressed by Edwards philosophical acumen.
Thank you Tony.
If you look at the Edwards resource page there we have posted the audio of Richard Muller’s lecture on Edwards, which, I think, addresses this issue.
Interesting to think about for sure. It’s hard to think about Edwards as a heretic, (as I weigh these matters I currently think of him as a flawed pastor as I sift through it all)
But if your and the other arguments brought that he is a pantheist (or your wording for it) is true he is a heretic who should be fully disavowed. Interesting to consider
Ben,
I don’t think that it is an either/or case but I do think that people should read Edwards with caution. They should be aware that he was not just another orthodox Reformed minister but that serious, sober-minded Reformed scholars (and others) have noticed in his work serious errors and problems. My main purpose here is to alert readers so that they do not read him ignorantly but intelligently.
That there is a strong panentheistic streak in Edwards seems to be somewhat widely accepted, excepting perhaps a select strand of Edwards fans who don’t want to hear this idea.
If I go by what I saw in my years at Mars Hill and of the YRR/New Calvinist scene I am not sure that people really engaged Edwards’ work so much as wielded it as a kind of badge of identity. People could say “Jonathan Edwards is my homeboy” but would never say, conversely, “John Neville Figgis is my homeboy”, for those who even know who Neville Figgis was.
Back when I was a Pentecostal teen I thought revivalism was important but by the time I got into my twenties and thirties I came to view revivalism as inextricably having a jingoistic and idolatrous component to it. It was impossible to shake a sense that however sincere Edwards was in his defense of what amounts to revivalism, subsequent generations of United States Christians have prized revivalism for the aim of national and cultural “renewal” rather than for glorifying Christ. I came to view Edwards’ cumulative (and unintentional) legacy on revivalism to have been mixed at best. Sometimes an idea presented in good faith is used in a kind of bad faith through new fault of, say, Edwards, but American revivalist impulses have struck me as generally inherently idolatrous. I have to admit that being half Native American through my Dad and having that ancestry influence my very negative takes on both Manifest Destiny and postmillennialism informs (or skews) my judgment there. Yet I understand that Edwards’ legacy on Native relations can be considered good while his defense of slavery is understandably seen as objectionable (and is the more popular thing to talk about in the early 21st century). That Edwards has good and bad elements should be kept in conversation but these were conversations I pretty much NEVER saw in the New Calvinist/YRR scene while I was in them.
Jonathan Edwards as panentheistic probably still has more orthodox theology than some obviously liberal figure like Schleiermacher but it might be all the more worthwhile to ask now and then whether Edwards’ theological weak points get a pass that is not given to an obviously liberal theologian when a strand of theology like panentheism can be found in both theologians.
I have actually managed to stay in touch with some friends (and even some former pastors) from the Mars Hill scene and I can, at least, say, a number of them ended up in actually Reformed denominations and have been installed within historically Reformed church settings. I was talking with a former MH pastor friend who ended up in a Reformed denomination about how easy it is to look back on the history of Mars Hill and realize that we were pointlessly reinventing wheels we were too ignorant to realize had already been developed within the Reformed traditions. The irony is that Mark Driscoll not only has no actual formal ties to any Reformed denominations he was vetted in his reboot in Arizona by Robert Morris but he’ll SAY, if asked, that he thinks of himself as Reformed.
I guess those 95 resolutions of Edward’s were all for naught,
Re Edwards and Locke:
Locke himself was raised in a Puritan home, and it is legitimate to say that his political theory echoes much of what you would find in Rutherford or Ponet from those days—even if Locke’s theology owed more to Arminians.
Peter,
According to Crawford Gribben’s volume on Owen, he, Owen, developed a doctrine of limited religious toleration by the state. We shouldn’t overstate Owen’s affect on Locke but neither should we think that there was no affect at all. Add that to the other, more latitudinarian streams flowing into Locke’s politics and theology, he was even more tolerant than Owen.
You have extensive proof of Jonathan Edward’s pantheism aside from a quote from Charles Hodge?
John,
1. Charles Hodge is not just some schmuck mouthing off about Edwards. If you’re not sure who Charles Hodge is, you might look into his biography.
2. Yes, scholars have been writing about peculiarities, to put it mildly, in Edwards’ doctrine of God and in other aspects of his theology for many years. Check out these resources on Edwards. You might start with Richard Muller’s inaugural lecture given at the Edwards Center several years ago. Muller is the pre-eminent expert in the history of Reformed theology in our time.
3. Yes, this is technically a blog but my full-time job for the past 29 years has been to teach church history and historical theology at a reputable seminary. In Recovering the Reformed Confession I documented issues with Edwards’ theology, piety, and practice. There’s a link to the book in the resources listed at the end of the article.
4. Just because something is new to you doesn’t make it new to scholars who do this stuff for a living. For your sake I’ve edited your comment.
Pantheism proposes that God is everything and everything is God. Jonathan Edwards spent decades preaching the Trinitarian God. These are not at all compatible. A pantheist cannot have a trinitarian God who sends people to Heaven of Hell. Whatever peculiarities you speak of about Edwards when he speculated hardly make him a pantheist. Explain how exactly a great theologian of Christian history is a pantheist?
Your comment is hardly new to me, I worked with Dr Gerstner and new of silly claims of pantheism, yet serious people do not make such accusations. Pantheism is a heresy, meaning one cannot be a pantheist and a Christian. So are you and Hodge and these other supposed great Reformed teachers willing to say that Jonathan Edwards was a heretic because you see some peculiarities?
This is nothing more than your Westminster Seminary periodic fealty test, finding someone not sufficiently Van Tillian to savage publicly to prove your loyalty to Cornelius. Edwards and Gerstner and other Classicists earn your spite for that reason and you throw darts from a distance to lessen the impact of their non Van Tillianism to your worldview.
John,
I’m only indulging you because, after publishing Recovering the Reformed Confession, I have come understand how deeply attached some people are to Edwards, how hard it can be emotionally to come to grips with the state of modern scholarship about Edwards.
I say “emotionally” because clearly you are upset and not making a lot of sense. E.g., Charles Hodge wasn’t and couldn’t have been a Van Tillian. Hodge was a fairly traditional Reformed theologian who was evaluating Edwards against the the broader background of historic Christian orthodoxy and Reformed orthodoxy in particular. On the Princeton reception of Edwards see Mark Noll’s essay, which I note in Recovering the Reformed Tradition. Warfield was even more critical of Edwards. That Hodge wrote as he did should be a wake up call to Edwardeans.
People make mistakes. All our heroes have feet of clay. Edwards came under the influence of Cambridge Platonism, a fact for which some Edwardseans have failed to account. Platonism can some deleterious effects on one’s theology as it seems to have done in Edwards’ case.
Richard Muller is hardly a Van Tillian. One cannot simply dismiss him with a wave of the hand without revealing a significant degree of ignorance.
Edwards left a mixed legacy in a number of ways. That’s why I wrote the article. Many Christians read Edwards and Baxter et al. devotionally and without much awareness of some of the serious theological issues that are behind their devotional writings. I want Christians to be alert and informed. What Baxter said about how house visits should be conducted was related to his doctrine of justification. What happened to worship in the 18th century, piety, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and even the Second Great Awakening cannot be divorced from Edwards et al. and the First Great Awakening. Anyone who knows that history knows that Edwards left a mixed legacy. That’s why I introduced readers to John Thomson, who represented traditional, confessional Reformed theology, piety, and practice. The visceral response by the advocates of the 1GA to Thomson and the few who dared to dissent lies behind your two comments.
My survey of some the modern Edwards scholarship has nothing to do with Van Til. For what it’s worth I’ve been quite critical of Van Til and Van Tillians on the doctrine of God. I appreciate CVT but his thesis that God is one person and three is indefensible theologically and contrary to the Athanasian Creed. If you read RRC you will see that I’m also critical of his account of the history of the church/history of doctrine and his approach to nature/grace including his approach to common grace, which I criticized in RRC. I’ve even called the neo-Kuyperian movement Anabaptist on nature and grace. Yes, I did defend him vis a vis Gerstner, Hoekema, and Clark regarding the ectypal/archetypal distinction but that was part of the project of recovering classical Reformed theology. It wasn’t Van Til who taught me that distinction. It was Junius. That’s been the burden of my work since the early 90s when I started working seriously on Olevianus and Reformed orthodoxy.
It might help you to know that the first mission of the HRA is to “recover the Reformed confession” and the second is to “help others discover it.” Before you reply, please take a look at my publications to try to get a sense of my work.
Try to be reasonable (after all, wasn’t Gerstner all about reason?). Take a deep breath and spend some time doing, as they say, “the reading.”
You cannot expect anyone to take your responses seriously if you’re unwilling to learn anything new.
Finally, I’ve never said that Edwards did or said nothing of value. I have particularly benefitted from his survey of redemptive history. It’s also the case that Edwards’ theology, piety, and practice diverged from that of the 16th and 17th century, the classical period of Reformed theology, in significant ways.
It might help if you read Mardsen’s bio of Edwards. It’s a masterwork of religious biography. It’s one of the finest things I’ve ever read.
If you can be gracious, you’re welcome to respond. If, however, you’re still angry and unable to respond in a godly way, please wait until you’ve calmed down. If you respond inappropriately again, that will be your third strike and you’ll be banned and your responses will go to the trash.
Thanks for your gracious response.
Perhaps the superficial reading of your article sounds like you were accusing of Edwards of being a heretic for pantheism, pietism, and wrong views of justification. I hope you will consider that when writing since words do have meaning, and pantheism is a true heresy, and Edwards could not have been a pantheist without being lost and an unbeliever and thereby a false teacher.
I apologize for over=reacting. I simply do not wish for modern Christians to believe that Jonathan Edwards was someone to avoid because he had a few odd ideas that moderns label with terms that are associated with heresies.
John,
You shouldn’t dismiss Hodge or the several modern scholars, e.g., Oliver Crisp, who was more pointed than Hodge, who’ve given attention to the questions surround his doctrine of God and his metaphysics. Hodge was not being cavalier. I’m sure he wrote what he did with fear and trembling because President Edwards’ shadow loomed large over Princeton. Here’s what I wrote in RRC.
257. Michael J. McClymond, “Salvation and Divinization: Jonathan Edwards and Gregory Palamas and the Theological Uses of Neoplatonism,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, ed. Helm and Crisp, 153.
258. Thomas A. Schafer, “Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith,” Church History 20 (1951): 55–67. More recently, George Hunsinger, W. Robert Godfrey, and others have also raised questions about Edwards’s doctrine of justification. See George Hunsinger, “Dispositional Soteriology: Jonathan Edwards on Justification by Faith Alone,” WTJ 66 (2004): 107–20; W. Robert Godfrey, “Jonathan Edwards and Authentic Spiritual Experience” (paper presented at “Knowing the Mind of God,” 2003 Westminster conference); Gary Steward, “Faith and Obedience in Jonathan “Edwards’ Understanding of Justification by Faith Alone” (unpublished paper, 2006). John Gerstner and Jonathan Neil Gerstner, Samuel Logan, Jeffrey Waddington, and Brooks Holifield have defended Edwards’s orthodoxy on justification. See John H. Gerstner and Jonathan Neil Gerstner, “Edwardsean Preparation for Salvation,” WTJ 42 (1979): 5–71; Samuel T. Logan Jr., “The Doctrine of Justification in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,” WTJ 46 (1984): 26–52; Jeffrey C. Waddington, “Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Ambiguous and Somewhat Precarious Doctrine of Justification,’ ” WTJ 66 (2004): 357–72; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 119–20.
259. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1873), 2:219.
260. Ibid., 2:220. A. A. Hodge later offered more restrained criticism of Edwards when he said, “President Edwards was always brimming over with ideas of his own, which stood in need of regulating”—quoted in C. A. Salmond, Princetonia: Charles and A. A. Hodge; with Class and Table Talk of Hodge the Younger (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1888), 179, and cited in David B. Calhoun, Princeton Seminary, vol. 2, The Majestic Testimony 1869–1929 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1996), 526 n. 25. Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 50, argues that Edwards avoided absolute monism.
I would regard these faults that you mention as speculative and inconsistent parts of his theology, whose inconsistency he did not realise. The heart of his theology is orthodox and has been recognised as such by the Christian Church in Britain since his writings started crossing the Atlantic (c. 1740s). They have been prized ever since. We are reasonably well aware of his faults, and don’t bother to read those things, just as we read Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor but not most of his other stuff. The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (to which I belong) has used Edward’s on the Affections and his Life of Brainerd for examining students for the ministry certainly since the 1960s and possibly far longer. Are you sure that the people that you mention had the “root of the matter”?
Doubtless there are blemishes in Jonathan Edwards’ theology, as there are in the theology of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Bunyan, John Owen, William Cunningham and many other exceedingly eminent men in the history of the Christian Church. In these cases, one Scottish minister advised his congregation to do what the cow does when it finds something unpleasant in the grass: spit it out and carry on feeding. Skip JE where he is weak or erroneous and concentrate on the places where he is profound and deeply edifying.
Douglas,
I understand that, as Crisp says, it is difficult for those who know Edwards as a devotional writer, to face the grave problems with his theology but honesty compels us.
Crisp: Edwards Was A Panentheist
More On Edwards, Affections, Romanticism, And Pantheism
Pantheism (or, if Crisp is correct, panentheism) is no mere “blemish” on Edwards theology. No, Calvin was not a Pantheist, nor was Luther, nor was Bunyan, nor was Owen. Pantheism is a fundamental error not a blemish. It changes everything, as indeed a number of Edwards scholars have recognized.
The ambiguities in his doctrine of justification are not mere “blemishes.” Were it just a blemish, I wouldn’t have drawn attention to it in Recovering the Reformed Confession nor again here. All the confessional Protestants agree that justification is the article of the standing or falling of the church. How can corrupting a foundational truth be a mere blemish?
His view of religious affections could possibly be a blemish. I have talked to many, however, who have labored under Edwards view of affections, who have struggled and doubted and lived with guilt and failure. On that level, it seems to me to be more than a blemish but a symptom of a deeper problem, his debt to Platonism, which vitiated his theology.
Using A for an assertion, when any assertion’s consequences are false, then the assertion is false, if the stated consequences are really the consequences. If A implies B, and B is false, then A is false. It doesn’t matter if A doesn’t state B.
If we only consider what a theory states, then almost no theories being defended either defend, have found, or state, false consequences, for that reason. False consequences refute any assertion. For a theory to be “essentially” discredited as false, it would mean the base assertion or assertions, and whatever they imply, being false, but that there may be statements said along with, that are not implied by the base assertions, that remain true. So I think Hodge might mean “logical consequences.” If something logically implies pantheism, and pantheism is false, then that which logically implied it, is false. To defend it, one would have to re-check if it really implies the pantheism, and re-check if pantheism is false.
“In its consequences, is essentially pantheistic” is a far cry from saying his thoughts are in their essence pantheist. “A quibble”? More like an honest and helpful distinction.
Joe,
You shall have to explain to me then what is the definition of essence. If someone says to me, “he is essentially overweight,“ that means that such a person is fat. I don’t see how the word essentially can be taken to mean, “but not actually.“ Perhaps you can help me understand how this can be?
Further, this is just one of several issues associated with his doctrine of God. these things are well-known and well documented in the secondary literature, as you can see above.
Dr. Clark, I know this is an old comment, but the part of the Hodge quote that you are not interacting with is the “in its consequences” phrase. Hodge is discussing what he believes are necessary consequences of Edwards’ view (namely that his doctrine of identity and causation discussed in his understanding of original sin leads to a denial of substance, and hence, agents other than God).
But, of course, Edwards himself did not believe that substance did not exist, nor that there are no agents but God. Nor does Hodge accuse him of believing such things. One can agree with Hodge that Edwards’ has not thought through the logical implications of his doctrine of identity, and that it necessarily leads to a form of pantheism, while also noting that Edwards himself explicitly did not believe what Hodge calls the “consequences” of his doctrine.
Kyle,
“is, in its consequences” means, logically, “essentially pantheistic.”
Hodge is not the only person to say this. See the rest of the notes. See also the Edwards resource page.
It’s not that hard not to be a pantheist.
It’s not that hard to be unequivocally clear about justification.
It’s not that hard to get the doctrine of free choice right.
Have you listened to Muller’s lecture?
The truth is that, judged against the classic Reformed tradition and the confessions of the church, Edwards was, at best, an idiosyncratic theologian.
He shouldn’t be your home boy.
Hodge actually says Edwards’s theory of identity “in its consequences, is essentially pantheistic.” For all his view’s problems, that’s not quite a statement that Edwards is a pantheist.
Peter,
Yours is essentially a quibble. If something is essentially pantheist, it is pantheist. To be essential is to be so necessary that without it, a thing is not what it is. It is of the substance of a thing. Pantheism is of the essence of Edwards’ doctrine of God.
Yom mentioned Edwards’ account of his wife’s religious experience, including levitation. Do you have a source in Edwards where he mentions that? I was amazed and a little disturbed to read that!
The 1st place I saw this was in M. Lloyd-Jones. I document it in RRC. It’s also mentioned in one of the two Marsden biographies of Edwards (the larger or the smaller, I don’t recall).
Dear Dr. Clark, thank you for the test!
I am astonished – I was eventually able to register and get access to Yale.edu. That was only the beginning of the process to locate Richard A. Muller’s first resource: J.E. free will. I found it!
Then I faced many challenges deciphering the historical arguments related to the philosophical and rational ideas, Platonism, and new terms about free will in the various camps of ‘thinkers’ for and against J. Edwards. At the conclusion I concluded their common problem: they each rejected the Wisdom of God that forms the Theology, Piety and Practice in BC 13, HC 8, CD Head II (rejections 2 & 6), WCF IX, WSC 82, and WLC 149, and of course, the Word of God, The Bible. Where does one begin with others who reject the Confessions, Catechisms, Canons and Creeds but comes to worship God?
When I listen to/study the philosophical arguments of evidence-based scientists who recognize that God is the Creator, the Son is the Redeemer, and the Spirit is the Regenerating Sanctifier, then there is value called wisdom of God. Philosophy is removed from the imagination of men and based in logical distinctions: natural vs supernatural. But when philosophy is used by men to reject God, arguments are void, a dark wilderness without hope: theology, piety or practice.
Though reading about J. Edwards is painful, it is not as painful as reading his ideas, and that is much less painful than meeting people in the Church who are committed to J. Edwards. Thank you for these resources and the distinctions you provide. Perhaps the pain and misery of studying the historical ‘free will’ distinctions will actually help me engage (winsomely) people caught up in 1GA and J.Edwards.
Dr. Clark,
Would you categorize Federal Vision as a reaction to “dead orthodoxy”?
Linda,
No, I don’t think so but it is sure route back to the Medieval church.
I first started to put Edwards on a pedestal when I heard R.C. Sproul refer to him as one of the five greatest theologians of all time. R.C.’s lecture was with regards to Augustinian vs. Pelagian systems. Since then I have heard rumblings of problems with Edwards but was not sure of the details. Thanks for these insight Dr. Clark.