Politics and Economics

Despite the fact that Edwards never authored an extended or thorough commentary on political and economic matters, we can detect his assumptions and the general shape of his political and economic commentary scattered throughout his moral treatises, biblical commentary, miscellaneous observations, and sermons. A devoted subject of the Hanoverian monarchy, he presumed that Britain’s empire was the most laudable political system in the Atlantic world. Among other virtues, it served as a hedge against French Catholicism. He interpreted the meaning of that empire through Whig political agendas, which included a robust endorsement of Britain’s transatlantic commercial empire. Yet Edwards’s theological agendas often devalued political and commercial loyalties into contingent goods, subject to critique. He held that theological virtues had the power to minimize national identities in favour of worldwide Christian communion and universal benevolence.

Idealism and Aetiology

Jonathan Edwards aims to account for causes by reference to the ideas of God. Every finite being not only depends on but consists in God having an idea of it and God is the one immediate cause for anything that exists on each occasion. He takes this idealistic aetiology to be the true factual description of things. However, his argument about ‘the nature of things’ is (partly) definitional and existential, and so he is introducing and recommending a new use for natures being immediate productions out of nothing at each moment. This chapter argues that his inference can be validly drawn only from the ordinary use of ‘substance’ or ‘nature’ but he attempts to draw it from his novel use. His idealism and aetiology thus affirm or presuppose for their intelligibility the existence of conditions that he denies. So, Edwards’s argument for idealistic aetiology is invalid.

Epistemology

For Edwards, epistemology went hand in hand with metaphysics, both intellectually and biographically, from his teenage years. The philosophical influences were Locke and Berkeley, and Malebranche as well with his Calvinistic emphasis on divine sovereignty, considered as an activity that was both transcendent, in God’s upholding of all reality, and his disclosure of himself in a wide range of sources, in his divine revelation in Scripture, in the experience of the effects of the new birth of his elect, and in his scientist’s interest in the flora and fauna of his New England environment. True knowledge of divine revelation was supernatural, through the imparting of divine light immediately to the soul in the possession of what he called a ‘new sense’. Beside those mentioned, he was influenced by St. Augustine and by the Puritan John Owen.

Sin and Evil

This chapter describes Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of sin and evil. It emphasizes the role of the Bible as foundational to his theology while also highlighting his desire to defend the reasonableness of traditional Christian doctrine in light of eighteenth-century intellectual challenges. The chapter explores Edwards’s theodicy in response to the problem of evil—how he sought to absolve God of the charge that he is the author of evil. It describes Edwards’s doctrine of original sin and human depravity, which he explained by defending the universality of sin and the transmission of Adam’s sin to his posterity and in which he developed an innovative metaphysic using occasionalism and continuous creationism. As a pastor, Edwards preached on sin to warn people of punishment, call them to repentance, and emphasize redemption in Christ. The chapter recommends giving greater attention to Edwards’s sermons and pastoral ministry in understanding his view of sin and evil.

The Person of Christ

Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of the Person of Christ has provoked a flurry of recent curiosity. Much of this curiosity has to do with how we make sense of the philosophical foundations on which the structure of Edwards’s Christology rests. In this chapter, I attempt to locate Edwards’s two-natures doctrine within the larger picture of catholic Christianity by situating his various claims about the God-man within the context of that historic distinction between concrete-nature and abstract-nature Christology, and all this, in light of his philosophical commitment to immaterialism. Putting Edwards’s philosophical speculations about the doctrine of the person of Christ into conversation with such important developments in the tradition is a step that must be taken if we are going to further enrich our understanding of his contribution to catholic Christology.

The Nature of God and the Trinity

Commonly recognized as fundamental to his thought as a whole, Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity has, nonetheless, been the subject of much discord in the secondary literature. After initially mapping the various perspectives (or ‘instincts’) on the issue, this chapter turns to the notion of personalism to explain the inner logic of Edwards’s account. This unique feature of Edwards’s doctrine explains how he can utilize traditional theological machinery in his doctrine of God (i.e. psychological imagery, simplicity, actus purus, filioque, and divine blessedness), to establish his idiosyncratic development of perichoresis and the divine attributes. What this reading of Edwards’s doctrine helps establish is how he articulates human speech about God, and various rules for how that speech functions (e.g. talk about God is to talk about person(s); God’s self-giving is funded by, rather than diminished by, God’s perfection).

Aesthetics

Edwards’s aesthetics grounded in the ongoing work of God communicated in creation, not only lies at the centre of his thought but is increasingly recognized as one of his most original contributions to theology. Edwards’s reflection on God’s beauty emerged in the context of his work as a pastor, which allowed him to frame God’s dynamic presence in dramatic and multi-sensory categories. For Edwards Beauty glimpsed in the form of images formed in the mind reflects a consent of being; the visual beauty of symmetry and proportion is meant to move the heart to consent to the will of God reflected in creation—what Edwards calls respectively secondary and primary beauty. All creatures are types and shadows of spiritual realities; beauty and morality are linked, though only the Holy Spirit allows believers to consent to God’s self-disclosure in creation. Edwards’s neo-platonic framework allowed his reflections on the revivals to affirm physical beauty while subordinating its meaning to the spiritual, enhancing its role as revelation but diminishing its value as an end in itself.

Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism

Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of the covenant is treated in this chapter. It is made clear that Edwards developed this theology in the broader context of reformed theology and in his own specific context. In his reflections on the covenant, Edwards concluded that one must draw a distinction between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace if one is to understand Arminianism and Antinomianism. Drawing this distinction also allows one to interpret God’s works in history. In his understanding of the covenant of grace, Edwards developed a stricter view of the covenant. In comparison with the reformed tradition and the puritan tradition of Westminster, he minimized the instrumental function that the covenant has, because he interpreted it as a marriage between Christ and his believers. The emphasis on the indwelling of the Spirit in the covenanted believers caused him to reject the preaching of law to believers. Ultimately he also rejected the Half-Way Covenant.

History, Providence, and Eschatology

This chapter discusses Edwards’s view of history and the end times. It does so by examining four interlocking frameworks of interpretation that Edwards inherited from Reformed-Puritan theology: first, a general approach to relating the Bible and history; second, an intense kind of providentialism; third, specific forms of biblical theology aiming toward an integrated salvation history; and fourth, a futurist type of millennialist eschatology. What emerges from this is the picture of an Edwards who was, for the most part, a traditionalist. At the same time, he, like many of his peers, engaged with the intellectual discourses of the Enlightenment, both by partaking in them and criticizing their perceived excesses. Edwards’s version of a moderate Protestant Enlightenment produced a deepened, eschatologically inflected interest in redemption history, which he understood as a progressive continuum. Within this framework of history Edwards came to assign crucial significance to revivals.

Ontology

The chapter argues that Jonathan Edwards’s concept of God was largely traditional and that arguments to the contrary which privilege his discussions of a so-called social Trinity are mistaken. It also takes issue with the currently popular view that Edwards was a panentheist. There is a clear sense in which God includes the world but—with one unique exception—the world does not include God. Just as the coming into being of Raphael’s Dresden Madonna is a literal part of his painting it, so God’s ‘acts’ of creation or emanation are properly regarded as parts of him, and what he does (that is, what he emanates) is literally part of that action. But what God creates or emanates is the history of redemption, and some parts of that history are more central or immediately salient than others. The material world, for example, is essentially nothing more than a platform on which the drama of redemption is enacted. The central or most immediately salient, on the other hand, are the lives of the saints, and it is only the latter whose lives can be said to include God. For because the saints necessarily include the Holy Spirit, they necessarily include God. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Edwards’s views on the ontological status of mathematical, logical, metaphysical, and morally necessary truths. The chapter argues that they are neither created by God nor exist independently of him but are instead aspects or expressions of his goodness.