were breached in Boston it seemed as though there might be no stopping the

were breached in Boston it seemed as though there might be no stopping the

∂≥∏ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

passages that by themselves might seem to contradict these universal sensibilities. Charles Chauncy, for one, was inspired by Taylor's volumes to spend seven years after the awakening revising his doctrines away from his earlier Calvinism. In young Jonathan Mayhew, who was less hesitant in proclaiming his new views, Chauncy had found a valuable ally.∫

As in Chauncy's case, reactions to the Great Awakening had opened the floodgates for anti-Calvinist doctrines, already far advanced in Great Britain, to surge into New England. The awakening, like all radical renewal movements, created a liberal backlash among those whom it had judged spiritually cold. Not all of anti-awakeners became liberal. Some ''Old Calvinists'' used strictly Reformed arguments to oppose the awakeners' allegedly excessive emotionalism. Nonetheless, a considerable number, of whom Chauncy was prototypical, reacted against what they saw as New Light ''enthusiasm'' and triumphalism by jettisoning Calvinism in favor of doctrines more consistent with the preeminence of reason.

The Calvinist awakening thus had the ironic consequence of undermining the structures of Calvinist orthodoxy, especially around Boston. The very divisions of the Boston clergy as well as strong insistence on Congregational government in eastern Massachusetts made it di≈cult to enforce strict doctrinal standards. By 1750 Boston was a vastly di√erent place than it had been in 1740. Theologically, no one was in charge. And once the dikes of orthodoxy were breached in Boston it seemed as though there might be no stopping the flood of anti-Calvinism in the countryside.

Freedom of the Will

Ever since his college days Edwards had thrilled to the intellectual challenges of his era. Calvinism had been dismissed by the greatest minds in this socalled age of light. It was ridiculed among the learned and in polite circles. Since the beginning of his ministry, Edwards had been warning against the almost inevitable inroads of such fashionable beliefs in New England. Having wrestled with the new views as a youth, he knew their power. For years he had been caught up in the practical response of promoting the great local and international revivals. Yet all that time he had been mapping his grand design to reestablish Calvinism's international intellectual respectability. Just when he was completing the several revival treatises, the death and Life of David Brainerd intervened. Still, by 1747 and 1748 he had been well under way in sketching a treatise on the freedom of the will and had told friends he would

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂≥π

soon be writing it for publication. Then he was interrupted once again, this time by the communion controversy, which preoccupied him for the next four years. Finally, by mid-1752, he got back to his anti-Arminian project.

In July 1752 Edwards explained to the Reverend John Erskine, a young ally who would be his chief publicist in Scotland, why he was commencing with a treatise on free will and moral agency. One of the objections most widely used to dismiss Calvinism as an ''absurdity'' was that its view of God's sovereignty and consequent human moral inability without divine grace undermined common sense notions of moral responsibility. Particularly, Edwards designed to answer ''that grand objection, in which the modern writers have so much gloried, and so long triumphed, with so great a degree of insult towards the most excellent divines and, in e√ect, against the gospel of Jesus Christ, viz. that the Calvinistic notions of God's moral government are contrary to the common sense of mankind.''Ω

This single sentence epitomizes Edwards' view of his intellectual calling. He was an apologist for ''Calvinistic'' theology versus ''the modern writers.'' Specifically, he was determined to answer objections to Calvinism based on appeals to the great touchstone of so much of eighteenth-century thought, ''the common sense of mankind.'' Edwards was determined to show that reason, even ''common sense'' itself, was more consistent with ''the gospel of Jesus Christ,'' as ''the most excellent divines'' of the Reformation had understood it.

Edwards had his argument for this long-planned volume well worked out in his notebooks. He began writing in August 1752 but was soon distracted by the struggle to control Stockbridge following the marriage of Abigail Williams Sergeant to Brigadier Joseph Dwight, the visit of Elisha Williams in August, and by his trip to New Jersey. Even though he did not get back to Freedom of the Will until the winter, he had it finished in 1753, ready for publication the next year.∞≠

Edwards' full title summarizes the position he was refuting as a keystone of modern thought: A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will, Which Is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. Everything else in the current assault on Calvinism, he was convinced, depended on that ''modern prevailing notion.'' His estimate of its importance knew almost no bounds. ''I think the notion of liberty, consisting in a contingent selfdetermination of the will, as necessary to the morality of men's dispositions and actions,'' he wrote to John Erskine in 1757, ''almost inconceivably

∂≥∫ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

pernicious.'' ''The contrary truth,'' however, was ''one of the most important truths of moral philosophy that was ever discussed.'' If modern notions prevailed on this matter, then the game was up for Calvinism. ''For allow these adversaries what they maintain in this point, and I think they have strict demonstration against us.''

The past fifteen lean years of Edwards' ministry, moreover, had convinced him of the destructive practical e√ects of the spread of the modern views. ''Notions of this sort,'' he told Erskine, ''are one of the main hindrances of the success of the preaching of the Word, and other means of grace, in the conversion of sinners.'' People needed to be ''properly convinced of their real guilt and sinfulness, in the sight of God, and their deserving of his wrath.'' Increasingly, however, people were ''excusing themselves with their own inability.'' If their hearts were ''as cold as a stone'' in rejecting Christ's infinite love, they blamed their wicked disposition on God and said they could do nothing about it. While they might feel occasional guilt for particular sins, such as lewd behavior, lying, or intemperance, they felt no guilt for their rebellious hearts that spurned God's love.∞∞

From our vantage point of two and a half centuries later, regardless of whether one shares Edwards' theological assessments, we can see prescience in Edwards' sense of the direction that Western thought, culture, and religion were heading. Culturally, the emphasis on the individual's wholly unfettered free will was part of what is sometimes characterized as the invention of the modern self. Contemporaneous with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is a tendency to objectify the self. The philosophy of Descartes (isolating the self as a philosophical certainty) is the best-known intellectual illustration of a much wider cultural trend. John Locke likewise posited rules by which individuals could step back and rationally evaluate their beliefs and commitments, thus fostering an ideal of self-responsible independence.∞≤ By the time Edwards was writing his treatises, many British colonials were already beginning to think of themselves as having individual rights that were self-evidently endowments of nature.∞≥ Two generations earlier virtually everyone's position in society had been (at least in principle) defined by status in community. In Edwards' day many social relations (subject, wife, child, apprentice, servant, slave, etc.) were still so defined. Yet a political and social revolution was nearly at hand. One harbinger of that revolution was the transformation in belief that was already sweeping through even the New England countryside. Individuals, especially adult men, were beginning to think of themselves as self-defined. Essential to self-definition was unfettered

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂≥Ω

choice. The individual man might submit to government, for instance, but only by his own free and sovereign consent.

The Protestant Reformation, ironically, was a principal contributor to this revolution. Christ, as the only mediator between God and humans, could free people from the claims of human institutions. No Protestants were more insistent than were the Puritans on self-examination of one's standing before God or on relationships defined by covenants demanding assent. Further, Calvinist revivalists, such as Edwards himself, were part of the eighteenthcentury revolution that accentuated individual choice and subverted the authority even of many Reformed churches and clergy. Yet rigorous Calvinists, such as Edwards and his Puritan forebears, kept such modern individualizing tendencies in severe check, balanced against their even greater insistence that one's status was defined only in relation to the absolutely sovereign God and to the communities that God ordained. Remove divine sovereignty from the emphasis on individual choice and the whole system would collapse.

Edwards had glimpsed something of the future of American religion as well. Self-controlled individuals, as he had observed in his parishes for the past fifteen years, would acknowledge guilt for particular sins, but not guilt for their fundamentally rebellious hearts. Guided by conscience, they saw particular sins as failures of will power, which might be overcome by exercising greater self-control.∞∂ The liberal Christianity of the new republic would be built around such moral principles. Even the most popular evangelicalism of the next two centuries tended to emphasize guilt for and victory over known sins. Although the submission of one's will to God and a subsequent infilling or baptism of the Holy Spirit typically would be urged as necessary to achieve moral purity, God's power was most often seen as cooperating with or working through the native powers of the sovereign individual will. While American Christianity in general and evangelicalism in particular came in too many varieties to allow easy generalization, we can at least say that Edwards was correct in identifying a trend toward what he called ''Arminianism'' in what would become ''the land of the free.''∞∑

Edwards' consternation over modern views of individual autonomy and moral agency led him to frame an old debate in a new context. Debates over freedom and determinism were as old as philosophy and familiar to the history of Christianity. Augustine had famously attacked Pelagius on the subject and Luther had taken on Erasmus. Yet Edwards had reason to see the stakes as higher in the mid-eighteenth century. As always, his first concern was theological—to demonstrate the implications of God's sovereignty. Now,

∂∂≠ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

however, the alternative individualistic moralism, spreading like a flood through formally Calvinistic lands, threatened to undermine the achievements of the Reformation itself.

Not only was Edwards distressed by the emergent modern individualism, he was also well aware of a modern threat on the opposite flank, that of mechanistic determinism. A Newtonian universe of the mechanics of matter in motion could be seen as entailing ultimately materialistic causes for every e√ect, including acts of will. Already before Newton, Thomas Hobbes, the notorious English skeptic of the mid-seventeenth century, had propounded such determinism. Arguably, the zeal of subsequent philosophers to defend free will was designed to counter such threats posed by a Newtonian universe.∞∏ Eighteenth-century philosophers typically argued that the Creator had instituted moral law as much as mechanical law and that the moral law, as reason and a trustworthy human intuition confirmed, simply entailed true free will.

The heart of Edwards' treatise, as its full title announced, was that moral agency, virtue and vice, reward and punishment, and praise or blame did not depend on the sort of freedom that Arminians and others asserted. His opponents—representing a broad spectrum of theological opinion from Deist to evangelical—claimed as necessary to freedom that the will must be selfdetermining or sovereign over itself so that the will could freely choose between alternatives ''as opposed to all necessity, or any fixed and certain connection with some previous ground or reason of its existence.''∞π

Edwards responded that the idea that such freedom was necessary for praise or blame was, quite literally, nonsense. For one thing, it posited a ''free will'' as though the will could produce e√ects without any prior cause, other than itself. It was as though the proponents of such an uncaused free will imagined that the faculty of the will were an agent independent of the person in whom it resided. The ''will,'' said Edwards, is simply a term for a person's power of choosing. As such, the will does not itself have some sort of hidden power of free choice. ''For the will itself is not an agent that has a will: the power of choosing, itself, has not a power of choosing.'' Rather, said Edwards, it is the person who has a will or the power of choosing. So it did not make sense to talk as though in order to be free the will must be free from the controlling dispositions of the person who is doing the willing.

In Edwards' view the only sensible way to talk of the free will was that one is free to do what one wants to do. That was also, he said, the common sense meaning of freedom. ''Let the person come by his volition or choice how he

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂∂∞

will, yet, if he is able, and there is nothing in the way to hinder his pursuing and executing his will, the man is fully and perfectly free, according to the primary and common notion of freedom.''∞∫ If having free will, then, meant being free to do what one wanted to do, that was another way of saying that one was free to follow one's own strongest motive. Choosing and acting freely could not mean anything other than that one was free to follow one's own strongest inclinations.

The alternative, said Edwards, that there was an agent called the ''will'' inside us that was free not to follow our own strongest inclination, is absurd. One might respond that our inclinations themselves are determined by our own choices of the will that were free in some other sense. But any such previous free choice would be subject to exactly the same constraints as any other choice. It would have to be itself caused by the person's own strongest inclination. Each inclination, in turn, has to be caused by something prior to itself in the disposition of the person, ad infinitum.∞Ω

Although Edwards deplored those who substituted ridicule for argument, he was willing to supplement hundreds of pages of careful arguments with a rare touch of levity. His opponents' views that acts of will, in order to be truly free, must be caused by themselves led to an absurd picture of human volition. Similarly, ''if some learned philosopher . . . should say, he 'had been in Tierra del Fuego, and there had seen an animal . . . that begat and brought forth itself, and yet had a sire and a dam distinct from itself; that it had an appetite, and was hungry before it had being; that his master, who led him, and governed him at his pleasure, was always governed by him, and driven by him as he pleased; that when he moved, he always took a step before the first step . . .': it would be no impudence at all, to tell such a traveler, though a learned man, that he himself had no notion or idea of such an animal as he gave an account of, and never had, nor ever would have.''≤≠

Edwards' alternative to what he saw as an equally absurd notion of a will that caused itself, was his definition of what it must mean to have free will. Our acts of will can still be ''free'' in the only coherent meaning of that term if all that determines our choices is what we ourselves want to do, that is, something in our own moral character, as opposed to some external constraint.

Edwards here developed a crucial distinction between natural necessity and moral necessity. By natural necessity Edwards meant constraints of natural causes that can be distinguished from ''moral causes, such as habits and dispositions of the heart.'' For instance, when persons are wounded there is a natural necessity that they feel pain—and no one would hold them morally

∂∂≤ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

responsible for that feeling. Moral necessity is also part of the nature of things, but it is the constraint we experience when our motives or inclinations are so strong that we can not resist them. Even those who might deny that the will is always controlled by one's strongest motive would have to concede, said Edwards, that sometimes a motive may be so strong that a person can not overcome it. So, at the very least, sometimes the will is inexorably determined by a person's own moral inclinations.≤∞

One can think of many such instances, said Edwards, where people's moral character make them unable to choose other than they do: ''A woman of great honor and chastity may have a moral inability to prostitute herself to her slave. A child of great love and duty to his parents, may be unable to be willing to kill his father. A very lascivious man, in case of certain opportunities and temptations, and in the absence of such and such restraints, may be unable to forbear gratifying his lust. . . . A very malicious man may be unable to exert benevolent acts to an enemy, or to desire his prosperity: yea, some may be so under the power of a vile disposition, that they may be unable to love those who are most worthy of their esteem and a√ection.''≤≤

Now, said Edwards, what indeed does common sense tell us about praise and blame in such cases? Clearly we praise the virtuous woman whose character made her unable even to think of prostituting herself more highly than the woman who chose correctly but could hardly make up her mind. Or common sense does not excuse a man of a very haughty and vicious disposition because of his character. Proponents of the modern concept of free will spoke as though for an act to be a virtue or vice the will has to act from a sort of equilibrium, selecting among options without any decisive constraints. In fact, however, common sense rightly assigns virtue or vice to a virtuous or vicious character as well as to the acts that inevitably arise from that character. The theological counterpart was that God and Jesus were praiseworthy even though their characters were such that they could do only what was best.≤≥

As always, Edwards' philosophy started with his theology. While his opponents were starting with principles of human morality and psychology and from those inferring what God's moral government of the universe must be like, Edwards was starting with what God must be like and then examining the human condition in that light. If God is absolutely sovereign, as Scripture claimed and Calvinists emphasized, and if God is eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent, how can there be meaningful freedom and moral agency?

If God is the omnipotent creator and sustainer of the universe, then everything that happened must be the result of God's will. There is no escap-

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂∂≥

ing this conclusion. God wills to govern creation in a variety of ways. Everything that happens according to the sequences of nature, for instance, must happen because of the original design of nature. God, of course, is not bound by nature and can will to interpose. Yet whether God wills to interpose or wills not to interpose, whatever happens is still just as certainly dependent on God's will. It does not make sense to suppose that at every moment in the universe there are millions of uncaused free acts of will that are not the subject of God's will, either positive or negative.

Such a universe is further unintelligible if we consider that God is eternal. An eternal God cannot be waiting for uncaused and hence unpredictable acts to happen. Rather, God sees all events simultaneously and so sees the sequences of events as they are determined by their antecedents. God's omniscience, or knowledge of these sequences, entails that they cannot be other than what they are, or in human terms, what they will be. In short, there is no escaping that all that happens does so under the control of God's will.≤∂

Such a rigorous Calvinistic view of a God-controlled universe might seem fatalistic and demoralizing if God were not supremely good and loving. It is at this point that Edwards' grand theological vision as articulated briefly in A Divine and Supernatural Light becomes most important for understanding his enthrallment with God-willed reality. All created reality is like a quintessential explosion of light from the sun of God's intertrinitarian love. Though creatures experience this light in time, God sees it from beginning to end, from the perspective of eternity. Unlike humans, God sees the ultimate consequences of everything. So God wills to permit evil but only because that permission grows out of the ultimately loving and just will of God who can do no other than create what is ultimately the greatest good.≤∑

Opponents of Calvinism derided it as fatalism. They equated it with '' 'Hobbes' necessity,' or 'making men mere machines.' '' Edwards responded that the resemblances were superficial. It was true that some of his arguments regarding the will being necessarily caused by the person's dispositions could be found in Hobbes. Anticipating this objection, Edwards remarked that ''it happens I never read Mr. Hobbes'' and that there was no rule that one needs to ''reject all truth which is demonstrated by clear evidence, merely because it was once held by some bad man.''≤∏

The crucial point for Edwards was how God governs the universe. Far from creating a purely mechanistic universe and then letting it run by some inexorable natural laws, as some Deists might posit, in Edwards' conception God governs by multiple means. For inanimate things God normally governs

∂∂∂ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

by natural laws, so in the Newtonian universe every motion is related by natural laws to every other motion, except when God occasionally intervenes miraculously. With persons, who are higher on the scale of being, however, God governs increasingly through moral necessity. God allows them choices that are their own choices.≤π Ultimately, of course, their wills, like everything else in the universe, are subject to God's will and design—Edwards saw no escape from that if God is eternal, omniscient, and all powerful. Yet the crucial point was that God exercised that sovereignty in a variety of ways. So he created intelligent beings who were free to choose what they wanted in the most significant ways possible in a God-governed universe. Their choices were fully their own, and they were morally responsible for their choices. Only in a universe of personal relationships, in fact, would there be room for moral responsibility. In an impersonal universe persons' choices would still necessarily be caused by antecedent circumstances, but there would be no basis for assigning moral responsibility to such choices.≤∫

The prototype for the meaning of freedom in the universe, for Edwards, was God's freedom. God acted out of moral necessity to do good, but God was perfectly free in the sense of not being bound by any necessity outside of himself. Human's choices were, of course, in an ultimate sense dependent on an omnipotent, omniscient God, like everything else in the universe that God created and governed. Yet in the choices for which they were held morally responsible, they were free in the highest possible meaning of that term in a universe of causes and e√ects. Their choices were thoroughly their own, not bound except by their own moral natures and inclinations.≤Ω

Edwards concluded triumphantly against the cultured despisers of Calvinism. Modern writers had spoken with magisterial condescension of ''the first Reformers,'' whom they said ''taught the most absurd, silly and monstrous opinions, worthy of the greatest contempt of gentlemen possessed of that noble and generous freedom of thought, which happily prevails in this age of light and inquiry.'' Arminians and others arrogantly trumpeted the triumph of common sense. Yet Edwards challenged them ''to produce any doctrine ever embraced by the blindest bigot of the church of Rome, or the most ignorant Mussulman, or extravagant enthusiast, that might be reduced to more, and more demonstrable inconsistencies, and repugnancies to common sense'' than the moderns' own views. True, the modern inconsistencies might be more subtle, having been propounded by some ''men of great abilities,'' some of whom had done great service to the church. Yet, Edwards believed, he had decisively demonstrated their own absurdities.

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂∂∑

Modern thinkers, rather than celebrating the widespread disparagement of Calvinism ''as an instance of the great increase of light in the Christian Church,'' ought to listen with ''truer modesty and humility'' to ''God's wisdom and discerning.'' Some contemporaries were so vain as to proclaim that if Scripture taught the doctrines Calvinists found in it, then God ''is unjust and cruel, and guilty of manifest deceit and double-dealing, and the like'' and that no book that so teaches against reason is worthy to be regarded as ''the Word of God.''

The facts of the matter, Edwards concluded with his characteristic hyperbole, were just the opposite. If Scripture taught ''the Arminian doctrine of free will'' that ''would be the greatest of all di≈culties that attend the Scriptures, incomparably greater than its containing any, even the most mysterious of the those doctrines of the first Reformers, which our late free thinkers have so superciliously exploded.'' So confident was Edwards that he had produced a strict demonstration against the Arminians that he could proclaim with what his opponents must have seen as bravado: ''Indeed it is a glorious argument of the divinity of holy Scriptures, that they teach such doctrines, which in one age and another, through the blindness of men's minds, and strong prejudices of their hearts, are rejected, as most absurd and unreasonable, by the wise and great men of the world; which yet, when they are most carefully and strictly examined, appear to be exactly agreeable to the most demonstrable, certain, and natural dictates of reason.''≥≠

Edwards lived just long enough to see the first glimmers of the impact of the most influential of his philosophical works. In 1757 John Erskine wrote to him that Freedom of the Will was being used to support some of the views of the noted Scottish philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames. Edwards responded in a letter carefully prepared for publication, pointing out his di√erence with Kames. Kames had said that the necessity that controls people's actions was inconsistent with liberty. Edwards, by contrast, wanted to make clear his most fundamental point: that he was not denying free will but defending it in the highest intelligible meaning of the term. His opponent's view of an uncaused free will was a logical absurdity—which therefore could not possibly be a condition for moral responsibility. ''I have abundantly expressed it as my mind,'' he reiterated, ''that man, in his moral actions, has true liberty; and that the moral necessity which universally takes place, is not in the least inconsistent with anything that is properly called liberty, and with the utmost liberty that can be desired, or that can possibly exist or be conceived of.''≥∞

Even though Edwards did not settle the perennial conundrum of free will

∂∂∏ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

and determinism to everyone's satisfaction, Freedom of the Will had an immense influence for at least a century, especially in Scotland and America. Although it was not as widely read as David Brainerd and not appealing to as broad a range of evangelicals as Religious A√ections, ''Edwards on the Will'' became a staple of Calvinist theology. In the United States prior to the Civil War most educated Protestants had to make peace with its arguments. Its power, it can be argued, was a significant factor in the intellectual resilience and influence of Calvinism in America well into the nineteenth century.≥≤

Before the Civil War, America produced many impressive theologians, but none as philosophically powerful as Edwards. Since the Civil War, America has had many great philosophers, but none who was, like Edwards, primarily a theologian. To fully appreciate Freedom of the Will one needs to view it not just as another piece of modern philosophy. More fundamentally, it is a philosophical tour de force by someone who was first of all a theologian.≥≥

Edwards' unrelenting commitment to the sovereignty of God led him to marshal his formidable dialectical skills in an assault on one of the seemingly impregnable fortresses of modern thought.

C H A P T E R ≤π kl Original Sin ''in This Happy Age

of Light and Liberty''

he crucial strategic question was what to write on after Freedom of the Will. By 1752, when Edwards was beginning that work, he was already sketching a larger master plan. Between 1742 and 1752 he had completed six treatises. In Stockbridge, where he saw his vocation more as a writer than as a speaker, he had every prospect of increasing that pace, so long as his health held up. Although he had local duties and encountered real distractions, the frontier village, surrounded by hills in the corner of the colony, had the advantages of isolation. Unlike Northampton, it was not on the way to anywhere. Unexpected guests were far less likely to appear at the door. He was not nearly so often called away for church councils or to fill neighboring pulpits.∞ What to do with this grand opportunity?

His answer was that he must devote the next years, if God willed, to a series of defenses of the faith that would continue what he had begun in Freedom of the Will. This set of works would include not only some more specific focus on the Arminian challenge in New England, but also continued attention to some of the broadest philosophical trends of the day. In preparation for this defense of the faith, he was developing a set of notebooks, titled ''Book of Controversies,'' in which he included sections covering most of the controversial Calvinistic teachings: ''Original Sin,'' ''Perseverance,'' ''Regeneration,'' ''Universal and Particular Redemption,'' ''Justification,'' ''Saving and Foreknowledge of God,'' ''E≈cacious Grace,'' ''Nature of True Virtue,'' ''Importance of Doctrine and Mysteries,'' ''Future Punishment,'' and ''Predestination.''≤

Of these, defense of the Reformed doctrine of ''original sin,'' and a number of other issues that clustered around it, was his most urgent concern. At least by the time he had completed his reply to Solomon Williams in summer

∂∂∫ Original Sin

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Jonathan Edwards' desk. Edwards increased its size to include separate spaces for his notebooks and papers on a wide variety of topics.

1752, Edwards had determined that as soon as he had completed the longdelayed Freedom of the Will, he should move in that direction.

In his letter to John Erskine of July 1752, Edwards revealed that his distress about rising apostasy had turned into alarm. As long as he could remember, England had been the source of a barrage of attacks on Calvinism, ranging from Arminianism, to Latitudinarianism, to Socinianism, and Deism. Now he saw the Calvinist defenses, both in Great Britain and America, collapsing. John Erskine had related a disturbing account of the inroads in Scotland of the anti-Calvinistic teaching of the notorious John Taylor of Norwich. Edwards connected that to his own observations of what he saw as a virtual revolution of thought in New England to conclude, in hyperbolic

Original Sin ∂∂Ω

terms, that the world might be seeing ''a remarkable time, perhaps such an one as never has been before.'' Edwards could hardly have been more gloomy. ''Things are going downhill so fast,'' he lamented to Erskine, ''truth and religion, both of heart and practice, are departing by such swift steps that I think it must needs be, that a crisis is not very far o√. And what will then appear, I will not pretend to determine.''≥

Edwards' anguish about the encroachments of Taylorite views was tied not only to his dismay at the international and New England trends but also to his personal preoccupation with vindication in the communion controversy. The Northamptonites' lax views, he had concluded, were connected to the spread of anti-Calvinist doctrines. Not that he thought any but a tiny minority of his parishioners were anything but Calvinists in their profession. Yet he saw their willingness to accept naturally virtuous ''Christian'' citizens as communicants as smacking of the delusive optimism regarding human nature that was sweeping the British world.

Edwards dwelt on this danger in his open letter to his former Northampton congregation, appended to the end of Misrepresentations Corrected, his reply to Solomon Williams, completed in June 1752. No less than three times he made the point that Solomon Williams' views of the virtue and sincerity of some unregenerate persons would inevitably lead—despite Williams' own intentions—to the views of ''Mr. Taylor of Norwich in England, that author who has so corrupted multitudes in New England.'' Such ''new, fashionable, lax schemes of divinity, which have so greatly prevailed in New England of late,'' he warned, were likely to corrupt Northampton's young people and to ''utterly explode'' the Calvinism of Solomon Stoddard that the Northamptonites professed to revere.∂

Edwards conceived of his counter to the Taylorite tide in New England as part of a three-pronged assault that would undermine the international trends at their source. The broader counterpart to the question of original sin was ''the nature of true virtue.'' ''Virtue'' was becoming the watchword of eighteenth-century thought. Modern thinkers characteristically saw virtue as a universal natural human trait that might be employed as the basis for society and cultivated as both the source and object of religion. The Northamptonites' perplexities at excluding good citizens from the church were a reflection of such trends. The theological implications of such sentiments were far larger. If modern ideas of virtue became the standards by which to judge theology, as they already were in most of the British domain, Calvinism would soon disappear. In eastern New England, Lemuel Briant's proclamation of

∂∑≠ Original Sin

The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Depretiating Moral Virtue in his published 1749 sermon was just one indication of how rapidly such new views were being accepted. Edwards, by contrast, insisted that one must start with theology, or the revealed character of God, in thinking about true virtue. To make that point explicit, he designed the third (logically the first) part of his attack. He would precede his dissertation on true virtue with a companion piece that would ''treat God's end in creating the world.''

After completing Freedom of the Will, Edwards worked on these three related topics at more or less the same time. At one point he thought he might produce a work in three volumes, one on original sin, one on true virtue, and one on God's end or purpose in creating the world.∑ Eventually he decided, instead, that Original Sin should stand on its own as a purely defensive work and that the other two dissertations (End for Which God Created the World and True Virtue) should be complementary parts of a separate volume. Before his long illness in 1754, he had preliminary drafts of much of what became the Two Dissertations.

By February 1756, he was ready to present a nearly completed draft of End for Which God Created the World to some colleagues. Samuel Hopkins recorded in his diary for February 12, ''Mr. Bellamy came to my house last Tuesday, with whom I went to Stockbridge and stayed there two nights and one day, to hear Mr. Edwards read a treatise on 'The Last End of God in the Creation of the World.' ''∏ We can imagine the three theologians gathered around a fireplace as Edwards read all through a winter's day, perhaps with Sarah, Lucy, and others sometimes sitting on the periphery.

This scene underscores that Edwards was not working alone. He was not only benefiting from his friends' criticisms, but also promoting a school of thought. Bellamy had published a major defense of Calvinistic doctrines, True Religion Delineated (1750), ''versus the principal errors of the Arminians and Antinomians,'' for which Edwards had furnished a laudatory preface. The younger Hopkins, who would be Edwards' most influential disciple, was now trying his hand at a major treatise. Very shortly before Edwards left Stockbridge in 1758, Hopkins had Edwards review his e√orts. ''Mentor has heard them,'' he wrote happily to Bellamy, ''and commended them and o√ered to be the first subscriber if I would draw up proposals for printing them.''π

The three apparently had agreed that, in the light of the controversy raging in New England over the origins of human sin, they should first of all o√er concerted defenses of Reformed teachings on the topic. Hopkins' vol-

Original Sin ∂∑∞

ume would be titled Sin, Thro' Divine Interposition, an Advantage to the Universe (1759). Bellamy issued Four Sermons on the Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin in 1758. Edwards had put aside his other treatises in spring 1756 and turned to Original Sin, which by May 1757 he had ready to send to the publisher. It would appear shortly after his death.

Edwards focused Original Sin very specifically on John Taylor's recent attack on Calvinism. He justified his attention to the English writer's popular volume by observing that ''no one book has done so much towards rooting out of these western parts of New England, the principles and scheme of religion maintained by our pious and excellent forefathers.'' Nonetheless, he assured his readers that his response to Taylor would also be ''a general defense of that great important doctrine.''∫

The doctrine of original sin—that all humans inherited both the guilt of Adam's sin and a corrupt nature—was one of the chief points on which eighteenth-century Calvinists were at odds with their optimistic era. The emphasis on human freedom and innate capacities for virtue reflected growing modern tendencies toward views that men, or at least gentlemen, could control their own destinies. Further, as ideas spread that even kings and queens must be bound by higher rational principles of morality and justice, the Calvinist system—which asserted that God's sovereign government was by definition good, even when humans could not fully understand God's ways—seemed increasingly out of step.

Edwards viewed his task as the vindication of some of Scripture's di≈cult teachings which, as he declared in his full title, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, he believed to be the doctrine long held by the true church. The Bible made many direct claims about the fall of the human race into sin, the race's universal wickedness, and the helplessness of humans to save themselves—all views that o√ended fashionable eighteenth-century standards of morality and justice. Taylor and his kind avoided these doctrines by starting with the modern standards and then selectively appropriating Scripture as it suited their purposes. Especially, Edwards claimed, they ignored some plain statements of the Apostle Paul, who in many places directly a≈rmed the basics of the doctrine. Edwards cited Romans 3:10: ''As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one'' and Romans 5:12: ''Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.'' And so forth. The Stockbridge theologian devoted the largest part of his long treatise to demonstrating that there was no way to make such statements fit the modern views.

∂∑≤ Original Sin

Although his rigorously Calvinistic biblical expositions made up the bulk of the dissertation, Edwards began and ended, as he characteristically did, with appeals to reason and observation. The biblical positions, he was determined to show, were at least as consistent with experience and reason as were any of the alternatives. Every natural born human who ever lived and who became a moral agent, he argued, had sinned against God. This universal propensity to sin was evidence of an inclination to sin or of a sinful nature. Even on this point he relied substantially on Scripture declarations as well as on other history. To clinch the argument Edwards pointed out that the most essential commandments were to worship the one true God and that the heathen nations did not come close to doing that naturally. Further, even when people had the Gospel presented to them, they were inclined to ignore it for lesser pleasures. On this latter point, Edwards enlisted a lengthy quotation from John Locke to the e√ect that if people were totally rational, they would immediately forsake all earthly concerns in favor of eternal heavenly rewards. What else could account for such well-known ''stupidity'' with regard to religion, said Edwards, but a depraved disposition?Ω

Edwards could draw on his firsthand knowledge of the American Indians to reinforce his point that the human race was not naturally inclined to do its duty. ''What appearance was there,'' he asked, ''when the Europeans first came hither, of their being recovered, or recovering, in any degree from the grossest ignorance, delusions, and most stupid paganism?'' Yet if Edwards had a dim view of the natives' culture, he believed their faults arose not out of any inherent inferiority, but from being part of the human race. Furthermore, by the standards that counted, European culture was in many respects far worse because of the lengths to which many people had gone in rejecting the light of the Gospel. ''To what a pass are things come in Protestant countries at this day, and in our nation in particular,'' Edwards exclaimed. ''To what a prodigious height has a deluge of infidelity, profaneness, luxury, debauchery and wickedness of every kind, arisen! The poor savage Americans are mere babes and fools (if I may so speak) as to proficiency in wickedness, in comparison of multitudes that the Christian world throngs with.''∞≠

Taylor, said Edwards, ignored all this evidence of universal declension and argued that, on balance, most people were more often virtuous than not. Nonsense, Edwards retorted. First of all, that was not true with respect to religious duties. Further, even if it were true, it would be like arguing that a ship setting out for an Atlantic crossing yet sure to sink would nonetheless ''sail above water more hours than it will be sinking.''

Original Sin ∂∑≥

The Genesis history and other biblical passages taught that God demanded perfect righteousness from Adam and Eve and condemned them and their posterity for one failure. Humans might think that unfair, but experience taught that one mistake often led to disproportionately dire consequences. A young man, for instance, might be induced by his friends to take a drink. He might, rather innocently consent to do so (as Adam and Eve were deceived by the serpent in the garden), but then he might soon become addicted. So it was not contrary to reason that a relatively innocuous first action could lead to a life of ruin.

The much harder question was whether this doctrine of original sin did not make God the author of sin. Edwards responded that every version of Christianity had the same problem. All Christians taught that there is sin in the world and that God created the world. Much as he had argued in Freedom of the Will, Edwards pointed out that the claim that free will makes sin unpredictable does not solve the problem. God would still be allowing sin. Since God could intervene, God would have no less culpability for continuing to allow the sinful acts than he would for allowing humans to be born with depraved natures that inevitably inclined them to sin.∞∞

Edwards had a relatively simple explanation of how God could permit people to sin without being the author of their sin. Arminians and many other Christian traditions made this same distinction, but Edwards was showing how it fit well into a Calvinistic framework. God created the first humans with two principles within them, Edwards explained. First, was a lower principle that ''may be called natural, being the principles of mere human nature; such as self-love, with those natural appetites and passions, which belong to the nature of man, in which his love to his own liberty, honor and pleasure, were exercised.'' In addition God implanted in humans higher supernatural principles ''that were spiritual, holy and divine, summarily comprehended in divine love.''

So long as the higher principle of love to God reigned supreme, Adam and Eve had been perfectly happy, in communion with God. Yet they also had the ability to choose evil. When they did, spurning God's love, God withdrew the higher spiritual principle from them, leaving the lower nature to rule. God thus allowed their sin but did so only by withdrawing the supernatural gift and allowing humans to act according to their own dispositions. The setting of the sun might permit frost, but strictly speaking it did not cause it except in a negative sense. So God by withdrawing the higher spiritual gift permitted his creatures to choose evil.

∂∑∂ Original Sin

The lower nature that God created for humans, furthermore, was not bad in itself. It was good so long as it remained, as originally created, a servant to the higher spiritual principle. When humans freely chose to sin, however, a revolution took place. ''The immediate consequence . . . was a fatal catastrophe, a turning of all things upside down, and the succession of a state of the most odious and dreadful confusion.'' Humans set themselves up as supreme, displacing God. Their ''inferior principles,'' Edwards explained, ''are like fire in an house; which, we say, is a good servant, but a bad master; very useful while kept in its place, but if left to take possession of the whole house, soon brings all to destruction.''∞≤

Once the supernatural principle was withdrawn, humans naturally bequeathed only their lower nature from generation to generation. That was no more di≈cult to understand, said Edwards, than that acorns will always produce oaks. Righteousness, in contrast, is not something that can be naturally inherited or acquired; rather it comes to each redeemed person according to a much higher spiritual principle, the gift of God of being engrafted into the tree of which Christ is the root.∞≥

Edwards' commonsensical account of how corrupt human nature might be inherited was leading toward his explication of the more di≈cult biblical teaching, that all humans inherited the guilt of Adam's sin. It was one thing to show how human nature based on self-love, unchecked by a higher love to God, might be passed from one generation to the next, so that each person who became a moral agent would inevitably sin. But Scripture, especially Paul in Romans 5, spoke of all Adam's posterity as sinners and all in need of Christ's righteousness.∞∂ Calvinists, following older Christian traditions, spoke of the imputation of the guilt of Adam's sin to all Adam's natural descendants as a way of explaining such teaching. How could one convince enlightened eighteenth-century readers that there could be justice in holding the whole race, including infants, guilty for sins they did not personally commit?

Edwards answered first by clarifying that the source of the guilt was that every human had a disposition dominated by an inclination to sin. Sin, as Edwards had insisted in Freedom of the Will, involved a person's inclinations, not just isolated acts. So Adam was guilty for his dominant inclination to commit the first sin as well as for the act itself. Similarly, people were culpable for their corrupt natures that inclined them to sin even before they might actually act on those inclinations.∞∑

The imputation of the guilt of Adam's sin could thus be understood

Original Sin ∂∑∑

according to the acorn-and-oak analogy that Edwards used to explain the universally inherited propensity to sin. The corrupt propensity was itself a fault, even before a sinful act. Every new branch and leaf of a tree would partake of its disease, even before the blight became apparent. One might think of it, Edwards suggested in a long note, as though ''Adam and all his posterity had coexisted '' and had been constituted by God as one complex person, as a tree is connected to its root or as the members of the body are connected to the head. Then one might imagine all taking part in a common disposition, and ''the hearts of all the branches of mankind, by the constitution of nature and the law of union, would have been a√ected just as the heart of Adam, their common root, was a√ected.'' In something of this same way the whole race concurs in Adam's sin.∞∏

Edwards still had to answer the objection that there seems something unreasonable in God treating the human race collectively, rather than as individuals. Yet, said Edwards, we accept such continuities in nature all the time. Once again think of the acorn and the oak or that a whole species of trees might be blighted. Moreover, we think of a man of forty as the same person he was as a child, even though almost everything about him is different. The same principle extends to questions of guilt. We hold people responsible for crimes they committed many years earlier. There is nothing contrary to the nature of things if God should extend these same principles to the whole race.

To bolster this di≈cult point—that the problem of the identity of the race was analogous to personal identity—Edwards unveiled his most complex metaphysics. If God sustained the universe, then the universe depended on God for each moment of existence. If God withdrew his energy the universe would dissolve into nothing. So, as he had observed in his early notebooks, it was as though the universe was recreated at every moment. That made God's will the cause of everything, even if God exercised that will through significantly varied methods of causation, such as constituting what we perceive as laws of nature or permitting people to make their own choices. So personal identity, like laws of cause and e√ect, and everything else are dependent on God's will and wisdom because if God suddenly withdrew the power that governs the universe, nothing in the universe would happen in the next moment.

A helpful analogy, Edwards explained in another long note, is to think of the continuing light of the moon, to which we assign a single identity. In fact, there is nothing in the moon itself that causes it to shine from one moment to

∂∑∏ Original Sin

the next. Similarly, if we view an object in a mirror, we assign a continuing identity to the object, but in fact it has no more real continuity than if it were a series of images flashed on the mirror. Edwards was here speculating, somewhat as David Hume did, on the implications of Lockean empiricism for causation. If what we know about reality is nothing but a series of experiences or impressions on our mind (like the images in a mirror), how do we know that phenomena we experience as cause and e√ect are actually so connected? Edwards, unlike Hume, resolved the problem by observing that the divine will constituted the system of cause and e√ects and kept it going.∞π Hence one can count on particular e√ects consistently following certain causes because God's will continues to constitute such sequences. So God's will continues to constitute all identities, whether of natural objects, of persons, or of the race. Some readers, Edwards acknowledged, would not be able to follow such ''metaphysics.'' For them, it should be su≈cient that the Bible plainly teaches that God does deal with the race as a whole and that we must accept ''the sovereign constitutions of the supreme Author and Lord of all, 'who gives none account of any of his matters, and whose ways are past finding out.' ''∞∫

While Edwards was defending traditional doctrines, he was doing so in some distinctly modern ways. Throughout his treatises he argued that various Reformed teachings were in fact consistent with the highest standards of reason and common sense. Such defenses of the faith by contemporary standards of reason could make one vulnerable to attack by the same standards. Nonetheless, as Edwards made especially clear in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, he was not resting his case on reason alone. At the end of the day he was ready to acknowledge that some of the plain teachings of Scripture must remain mysteries to feeble human intelligence.

Edwards had once used a story to illustrate the limits of human understanding. ''I once told a boy of about thirteen years of age,'' he recounted, ''that a piece of any matter of two inches square was eight times so big as one of but one inch square, or that it might be cut into eight pieces, all of them as big as that of but an inch square.'' The boy (apparently not the brightest of thirteen-year-olds) thought the idea absurd, and nothing Edwards did could convince him otherwise. Finally Edwards got a saw and cut a two-inch cube that he then cut into eight one-inch cubes. The boy still could not believe it and kept counting the cubes. ''He seemed to [be] astonished as though there were some witchcraft in the case and hardly to believe it after all, for he did not yet at all see the reason for it.'' So, said Edwards, it was as di≈cult a mystery for the boy as is the doctrine of the Trinity to a Socinian or Deist.

Original Sin ∂∑π

''And why should we,'' he reflected, ''not suppose that there may be some things that are true, that may be as much above our understandings and as di≈cult to them, as this truth was to this boy. Doubtless, there is a vastly greater distance between our understanding and God's, than between this boy's and that of the greatest philosopher or mathematician.''∞Ω

Consistent with such a recognition of the limits of his understanding, in Original Sin Edwards was considerably more modest than he had been in Freedom of the Will, as a comparison of the conclusions of the two treatises nicely reveals. At the end of Freedom of the Will he proclaimed that he had so conclusively demonstrated his view that it would have cast doubt on Scripture if it had taught otherwise. In Original Sin, by contrast, he claimed only that his combination of common sense and metaphysics had clearly demonstrated that the Scripture doctrines were not unreasonable. In the last analysis the argument came down to what Scripture said—and the plain meanings of Scripture were sometimes philosophically di≈cult.

So this time he turned his irony not against the supposedly enlightened philosophers of the age, but rather against the new biblical interpreters. How wonderful is it, he mocked, that these ''new writers'' have discovered in the Apostle Paul meanings so deep that they escaped the view of all previous interpreters for fifteen or sixteen hundred years. ''No wonder then, if the superficial discerning and observation of vulgar Christians, or indeed of the herd of common divines, such as the Westminster Assembly, etc. falls vastly short of the Apostles reach.'' We have to realize, Edwards continued his irony, that the Reformers and all interpreters before and since ''dwelt in a cave of bigotry and superstition, too gloomy to allow 'em to use their own understandings with freedom, in reading the Scripture.'' Now, though, moderns have left the cave and ascended to the light. ''It must be understood, that there is risen up, now at length in this happy age of light and liberty, a set of men, of a more free and generous turn of mind, a more inquisitive genius, and better discernment.''

Yet while Edwards was supremely confident that he had defeated those who read modern meanings into Paul, he closed on a humble note, as though he recognized that the Scripture doctrine left mysteries that even the best metaphysics might not penetrate. ''The candid reader'' could judge the success of his arguments, but ''the success of the whole must now be left with God, who knows what is agreeable to his own mind, and is able to make his own truths prevail; however mysterious they may seem to the poor, partial, narrow and extremely imperfect views of mortals, while looking through a cloudy and delusory medium.'' However imperfectly humans might understand, God

∂∑∫ Original Sin

had promised that ''the Gospel of Christ . . . shall finally be victorious'' and that God's Word '' 'shall not return to him void.' '' ''Let God arise, and plead his own cause, and glorify his own great name. amen.''≤≠

Edwards' defense of original sin bears on the perennial debate concerning his modernity and fits into a general pattern that we have already seen, that he was simultaneously a strict conservative and an innovator. Almost all of his views were scrupulously consistent with those that had prevailed in New England a century earlier. Yet he was not, as Peter Gay suggested, a tragic anachronism fighting for outdated opinions long after they were defensible.≤∞

Edwards' genius was to show how his core theological views were intellectually viable in the Enlightenment era. Of course, not everyone in the eighteenth century accepted his New Light Calvinism, but then neither did everyone, or even all well-educated men, accept the fashionable liberal divinity and mores. In fact, in the ''century of lights'' it was sharply contested as to what counted as true ''light.'' The histories written by Gay and other twentieth-century ''winners,'' or the liberal heirs to the Enlightenment, have not taken that aspect of the past seriously enough. John Wesley had more impact on the eighteenth-century English-speaking world than did David Hume. Edwards not only posed conservative challenges to the fashionable ideas and mores of his era, but he showed the way for New Light Calvinism to flourish in subsequent generations. He was not just a latter-day Puritan, although puritan he was, but also the fountainhead for a vital movement that played a leading role in American religious and intellectual life for the next century.≤≤

More to the point than the definitional debate over what in the eighteenth century we should call ''modern'' is the larger issue of whether it is not liberal modernity that is tragically flawed, and precisely at the point that Edwards and his tradition said it was, in its optimism regarding human nature. As has often been observed, no Christian teaching has had more empirical verification during the past century than the doctrine of innate human depravity. Champions of modernity or postmodernity may not agree with Edwards' way of accounting for the defects of the human race, but they may have more di≈culty in arguing that Edwards was wrong to be challenging the emerging optimism of the ''age of light.''

C H A P T E R ≤∫ kl Challenging the Presumptions of the Age

t the same time Edwards was focusing narrowly on defending the Calvinist doctrine of original sin, he was designing a broader counterattack against some of the most prevalent assumptions of modern thought. Apparently because he perceived a theological crisis in New England, he regarded the publication of Original Sin as a priority. He may also have thought it prudent to secure one's defenses before venturing on an o√ensive.

As soon as he sent Original Sin to the press in May 1757, he turned back to the largely completed drafts of the Two Dissertations. These were virtually complete before his death, although not transcribed into his legible public hand for the press. Hopkins and Bellamy became his literary executors, but it took until 1765 for them to see these works through to publication.

In February 1757 Edwards described these two treatises to Thomas Foxcroft, his Boston literary agent, as answering ''the modern opinions which prevail concerning these two things, [which] stand very much as foundations of that fashionable scheme of divinity, which seems to have become almost universal.''∞ These paired works would be less directly polemical than Freedom of the Will and Original Sin. Rather than defending particular doctrines, he would be attempting to undermine the foundations of what had gone wrong in modern thought. The first dissertation would lay out the fundamental premises for understanding human relationships by considering the question ''What is the purpose for which God created the universe?'' Only then, with a correct understanding of God's intention for human existence, would one be in a position to approach the subject of the second dissertation—one of the great topics of his day—''the nature of true virtue.''

∂∏≠ The Presumptions of the Age

Why Would God Create a Universe?

The key to Edwards' thought is that everything is related because everything is related to God. Truth, a dimension of God's love and beauty, is part of that quintessentially bright light that pours forth from the throne of God. Every other pretended light, or source of truth, is as darkness if it keeps God's creatures from seeing the great sun of God's light. The created universe itself is a dynamic expression of that light, yet sin blinds humans from acknowledging the source of the light that surrounds them. Having turned away from the true light of God's love, they now grope in darkness, inordinately loving themselves and their immediate surroundings, or chasing after false lights of their own imaginings. Only the undeserved gift of redemption, bought with Christ's blood, can open their eyes and change their hearts so that they see and love the triune God and the created universe as wholly an expression of God's creative and redemptive will. Only through the prism of the revelation recorded in Scripture can they discover the nature of God's creative and redemptive purposes. Once sinners experience God's love, they begin to love what he loves.

If we recognize this essentially Augustinian framework that shapes all of Edwards' thought, it becomes apparent that the Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World was a sort of prolegomenon to all his work. Although he paired it specifically with The Nature of True Virtue, the most philosophical of his writings, to which its theology is the necessary premise, the End for Which God Created the World might be seen as the logical starting point for all of his thinking.≤ Had he lived to work on his great projected ''History of the Work of Redemption,'' the dissertation would have surely been a point of departure for that ''body of divinity in an entire new method.''

The End for Which God Created the World, though often highly acclaimed, is one of the less read (and less easy to read) of Edwards' treatises because it focuses on the narrow starting point for this larger theological vision. Nevertheless, this theological and Scriptural prolegomenon is essential for understanding how Edwards positioned himself in relation to the prevailing philosophies of the era. Eighteenth-century moral philosophers and moral popularizers were increasingly speaking of the deity as a benevolent governor whose ultimate interest must be to maximize human happiness. Alexander Pope's Essay on Man is the best-known popular expression:

The Presumptions of the Age ∂∏∞

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Edwards' library table

All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see: All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, ''whatever is, is right.''

Edwards himself might have assented to these few lines, justifying the ways of God to man. He and his friends were deeply engaged in a similar enterprise.≥

But in Pope's version the natural order was essentially benevolent.

God in nature of each being, founds Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds: But as he fram'd the Whole, the Whole to bless, On mutual Wants built mutual Happiness: So from the first, eternal order ran, And creature link'd to creature, man to man.∂

Voltaire's Candide (1759), a bitter satire on the idea of the ''best of all possible worlds'' written in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and at nearly the same time Edwards was finishing his dissertation, represents

∂∏≤ The Presumptions of the Age

another well-known pole in this same debate concerning God's purposes. Whether the ''best of all possible worlds'' was celebrated by a popularizer like Pope or a sophisticate like the German Leibniz (who was in some ways like Edwards without the Calvinism), the French philosophe thought it demonstrably nonsense.∑ Yet like other moralists of his day, Voltaire believed that following the light of nature would lead toward human self-improvement.

The End for Which God Created the World, in the meantime, sidestepped all secondary questions, such as the problem of evil or of eternal punishment, and concentrated on a crucial prior issue. If ''our modern freethinkers'' were determining God's character by gauging what sort of universe would maximize human happiness, they were starting at the wrong end by looking first at humans' interests rather than at God's.∏ In e√ect, they were setting up principles regarding human happiness as higher than God because they were insisting God must conform to these principles. Or, to put it in the framework in which Edwards addressed the issue, they were setting up their own perceptions of what constituted the greatest human happiness as the ultimate (or highest) end or reason that God created the universe.

Edwards insisted that any inquiry into the ultimate end for which God created the universe must be derived from knowledge of the revealed character of God. The heart of Edwards' exposition was his analysis of the many Scriptural references that the highest end of creation is ''the glory of God.'' As in all of Edwards' thought, his premise was that God is infinitely above all his creatures and is infinitely good. While it would be inappropriate for an inferior being to be ultimately motivated by self-love, preeminent love to self is not inappropriate to a being who is infinitely good because in that case selflove is simply to love what is infinitely good.

Yet why would such an infinitely good, perfect, and eternal being create? How could creation of the time-bound and less than perfect be anything but a diminishment of God? Here Edwards drew on the Christian trinitarian conception of God as essentially interpersonal. Although Edwards did not emphasize the trinitarian basis of the argument (as with most topics, he had expounded that subject in another manuscript),π he did allude to it to make the point that God's infinite goodness is essentially the goodness of love, expressed first in intertrinitarian love such as between the Father and the Son.

The ultimate reason that God creates, said Edwards, is not to remedy some lack in God, but to extend that perfect internal communication of the triune God's goodness and love. It is an extension of the glory of a perfectly good and loving being to communicate that love to other intelligent beings.

The Presumptions of the Age ∂∏≥

God's joy and happiness and delight in divine perfections is expressed externally by communicating that happiness and delight to created beings. God's internal perfection or glory radiates externally like the light that radiates from the sun. The glory of God ''is fitly compared to an e√ulgence or emanation of light from a luminary, by which this glory of God is abundantly represented in Scripture. Light is the external expression, exhibition and manifestation of the excellency of the luminary, of the sun for instance: it is the abundant, extensive emanation and communication of the fullness of the sun to innumerable beings that partake of it.''∫

The happiness of humans, then, when rightly understood, is not an ultimate end of creation in any way apart from God and God's glory. ''The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this a√air.''Ω

That last sentence encapsulated the central premise of his entire thought. It is as though the universe is an explosion of God's glory. Perfect goodness, beauty, and love radiate from God and draw creatures to ever increasingly share in the Godhead's joy and delight. ''God's respect to the creature's good, and his respect to himself,'' Edwards explained, ''is not a divided respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at is happiness in union with himself. . . . The more happiness the greater union: when the happiness is perfect, the union is perfect. And as the happiness will be increasing to eternity, the union will become more and more strict and perfect; nearer and more like to that between the Father and the Son.'' The ultimate end of creation, then, is union in love between God and loving creatures. Because eternity is infinite, this union between God and the saints can be ever increasing, like a line ascending toward an infinite height but never reaching it. So the saints' happiness will continually increase as they are drawn ever closer toward perfect union with the Godhead.∞≠

This conception of an exploding God-centered universe in which God creates in order ever increasingly to share divine happiness with his creatures had countless theological implications that Edwards had long been working on in his publications and notebooks. He looked forward to his magnum opus, ''The History of Redemption,'' where he would treat all of these and many other theological issues in their place. First, however, he was determined to show how a consistent theology that recognized a loving and dynamic creator God would undercut the most influential philosophy of the era.

∂∏∂ The Presumptions of the Age

''True Virtue'' in an Age of ''Virtue''

Edwards addressed The Nature of True Virtue to the eighteenth-century philosophers. Although he paired it with a theological treatise, he kept the theology of Concerning the End for Which God Created the World as broadly Christian as he could, so as to establish a wide foundation for his philosophical analysis of virtue. Unlike his other works, in The Nature of True Virtue Edwards did not quote Scripture, although he did appeal to its authority for the theistic basis of his ethics. His object was to establish an analysis in which, if one granted merely a few essential principles of Christian theology, one would be forced to reconsider the whole direction of eighteenth-century moral philosophy.

To feel the force of this challenge, we must view Edwards and True Virtue in their international context.∞∞ In broadest terms, the British moralists since the time of John Locke were attempting to establish a new moral philosophy as a science equivalent to the new natural philosophy, or natural science. True to the spirit of the age, modern thinkers were striving to establish firm foundations for knowledge that would be universally valid for all humans. Christendom, ever since the Reformation, had been torn by the absolutist dogmas of warring religious authorities. The grand hope of the modern moral philosophers was that they could discover universally valid moral standards with which they could adjudicate competing absolute claims and in e√ect stand above them.

In the English-speaking world, the overwhelming consensus was that the foundations for a universal morality must have an empirical as well as a rational base. Just as the natural laws of the physical world could be established on the foundations of universal principles of perception, so the philosophers of the day believed that moral principles could be based on similarly firm foundations that no reasonable person could doubt. John Locke was the best-known progenitor of this project. Not only did he develop an empirical philosophy that explained perceptions of the physical world, he also established a political philosophy based on ''self-evident'' first principles of morality, most notably the rights to life, liberty, and property. Since Locke's time the discussions had advanced on many fronts among British moralists. Most were attempting to show that normal human beings were endowed with powers to know and to obey the moral laws that were built into the scheme of things, just like other natural laws.

The new moral philosophy was part of the modern project that made

The Presumptions of the Age ∂∏∑

nature normative for understanding the self and self-understanding normative for morality. The Reformation challenged the mediatorial role of the church but asserted the authority of Scripture as the preeminent source for theology and ethics. It also encouraged, as was notable among Puritans, examination of one's own experience to determine whether one was truly a recipient of God's redeeming grace. In England after the Puritan era, the immediate sequel was Cambridge Platonism, which deemphasized dogma and asserted human abilities to be attuned to the divine. The next step, suggested especially by Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), was to posit a natural moral sense that was a reliable guide to the moral principles a benevolent Creator had built into the natural order.∞≤

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), a Scottish ex-Calvinist, best developed Shaftesbury's views. His Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1725) established him as the most influential moral philosopher of the era and the one whom Edwards was most eager to counter. Moralists since Locke were agreed that humans must be endowed by the Creator with a natural faculty with which to make reliable moral judgments. They were divided, however, between those who insisted that this moral faculty was dependent on the right judgment of intellect and those who, like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, viewed it as a ''moral sense.'' All agreed that the moral faculty led people to approve of benevolence and that benevolence could be perceived as a type of beauty, since benevolence promoted harmony versus disharmony. Hutcheson argued that the moral sense, also called conscience, was closely analogous to a sense of beauty. ''What is approved by this sense we count as right and beautiful, and call it virtue; what is condemned, we count as base and deformed and vicious.''∞≥

Edwards' language and categories sounded a lot like Hutcheson's because the two had worked within the same wider eighteenth-century discourse. Edwards had long since expounded on a spiritual sense analogous to a sense of beauty and had made that familiar principle the bedrock of his analysis in Religious A√ections. For Edwards a truly spiritual sense of beauty was what distinguished the regenerate from the unregenerate. Hutcheson, by contrast, had been arguing that all humankind were endowed by their Creator with a sense of moral beauty su≈cient to lead them, if they followed its dictates, to a life of virtue for which they were also promised eternal rewards.

Although Hutcheson and Edwards worked in the same universe of discourse, their views were poles apart because the Scottish philosopher, like most of his contemporaries, was assuming that nature and human nature

∂∏∏ The Presumptions of the Age

provided normative guides to human life. In the view of Hutcheson and his peers, God must be a benevolent deity who created a universe designed for moral harmony. Humans needed only to discover and follow the inbuilt natural laws.

Such assumptions about the sources of morality had immense implications for shaping the modern world. They were crucial for teaching people that they could free themselves from external authorities and at the same time internalize moral principles that would make them useful citizens. Attitudes of self-discipline were socially useful in helping to produce free individuals who could compete in the new commercial culture. Another common view of the era was that even private vices, growing out of self-interest, could result in public virtue.∞∂ A generation later Hutcheson's countryman Adam Smith (1723–90) most famously applied such assumption regarding benevolent natural laws explicitly in defense of a free market economy. Hutcheson's emphasis on sentiment anticipated the romantic views of the self, reliant on the guidance of nature from within, so important to the emergence of the nineteenth-century middle classes.∞∑

Much of American thought from the Revolution to the Civil War was shaped by the immensely impressive Scottish Enlightenment. It is illuminating to think of Edwards in that Scottish context. American colonists in the 1750s thought of themselves as British provincials and increasingly looked to Scotland, the preeminent British province, for intellectual guidance.∞∏ Edwards was no exception. He depended on his Scottish correspondents for the latest intelligence and to supply many of the books he needed to participate in the international conversation.

Just as Edwards was writing his great treatises in the 1750s, Scotland was emerging as the brightest intellectual center in the Western world. In addition to Hutcheson there was Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose views on the will Edwards contrasted with his own in 1757, and David Hume, whose A Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40) Edwards read with great interest. Edwards did not live quite long enough to learn of the work of the two other Scottish philosophers who had the most influence in America, Thomas Reid (1710–1796), the most famous articulator of ''common sense'' philosophy, and Adam Smith.

Nonetheless, Edwards thought of himself first of all as a British citizen and was especially in touch with the Scottish Enlightenment. Late in 1755 Edwards wrote to John Erskine that he had read Lord Kames' Essay on the Principles of Morality (1751) ''and also that book of Mr. David Hume's which

The Presumptions of the Age ∂∏π

you speak of. I am glad of an opportunity to read such corrupt books; especially when written by men of considerable genius; that I may have an idea of the notions that prevail in our nation.''∞π Edwards' use of ''our nation'' is one of those inconspicuous clues that reveals how he thought of his national identity. Great Britain was crucial to him because it was a Protestant nation. Now even Presbyterian Scotland, where he found his strongest allies, was in danger of being destroyed by the new corrupt thought.

As he was finishing The Nature of True Virtue in 1757 Edwards could for the first time begin to see some fulfillment of his lifelong ambition to lend his own considerable genius to the great philosophical debates of the day. Freedom of the Will had put him on the intellectual map, a position he hoped his letter contrasting his views to those of Lord Kames would help underscore. The Nature of True Virtue had the potential to extend the challenge.

In the very first sentence Edwards signaled both that he was entering into this international conversation on moral philosophy and that he was at home with its fundamental terms. ''Whatever controversies and variety of opinions there are about the nature of virtue,'' he began, ''yet all (excepting some skeptics who deny any real di√erence between virtue and vice) mean by it something beautiful, or rather some kind of beauty or excellency.'' Further, this same sentence indicated that he was not here particularly concerned to sort out all the ''controversies and variety of opinions there are about the nature of virtue.'' Unlike most of his other treatises, this one did not mount polemics against the statements of particular authors, Hutcheson or anyone else. Rather, he was laying gunpowder at the foundations of the entire project of all the celebrated moral philosophers of the day.

Edwards' basic point was as simple as it was characteristic of all his thought. ''Nothing is of the nature of true virtue,'' he explained, ''in which God is not the first and the last.'' God is love and the source of all love. True love, true benevolence, is love that resonates with God's love and is in harmony with it. This conclusion, Edwards pointed out, is a necessary implication of ''the preceding discourse of God's End in Creating the World.'' God's very being is ''love and friendship which subsists eternally and necessarily between the several persons in the Godhead.'' The ultimate end or purpose of creation is as an expression of that love. Intelligent beings are created with the very purpose to be united in love with the Godhead. And to be united in love with the Godhead means to love what God loves, or all being. God is ''the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of

∂∏∫ The Presumptions of the Age

whom, and through whom, and to whom, is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.''∞∫

Because Edwards was writing primarily for moral philosophers, he subordinated such theological language to more abstract arguments—the sorts of arguments that only philosophers might love. ''True virtue,'' he said in his primary statement of his thesis, ''most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general.'' ''Or perhaps to speak more accurately,'' he continued, ''it is that consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general, that is immediately exercised in a general good will.''∞Ω These statements become clearer if seen in their theological framework. True virtue, or universal benevolence, is possible only if one's heart is united to God, who is love and beauty and the source of all love and beauty. Any other loves, absent from this properly highest love, will be love for much less than all that one ought to be loving, and hence contrary to the very purpose for which one was created.

Edwards' central argument to this conclusion was simply an expansion of a distinction, common to the modern moralists, between private interests and benevolence. Hutcheson, for instance, argued ''That we have a moral sense or determination of our mind, to approve every kind a√ection either in our selves or others and all publicly useful actions which we imagined do flow from such a√ection without our having a view to our private happiness, in our appropriation of these actions.'' So, for instance, all people will instinctively approve when they hear of someone who found a treasure and used it for benevolent purposes. Even people who themselves would use the treasure only for private self-indulgence will share this sentiment of approval of those who use it in the public interest.≤≠ All Edwards was doing was taking this distinction between private interests and public benevolence and pressing it to its conclusion if one considered the entire universe.

Much of what was lauded as true virtue, Edwards pointed out, was no more than private interests writ large. People universally admired, for instance, familial love. Yet love for one's family, however admirable in itself, was still quite evidently an expression of private rather than public benevolence. Families often are very selfish with respect to other families. Other wider loves, such as for community or nation, were only larger illustrations of the same principle. Such loves were indeed admirable within their limited contexts, but not ultimately virtuous in the sense of promoting universal benevolence. ''Hence,'' wrote Edwards, ''among the Romans love to their country

The Presumptions of the Age ∂∏Ω

was the highest virtue: though this a√ection of theirs, so much extolled among them, was employed as it were for the destruction of the rest of the world of mankind.'' The general principle that followed was simple: ''The larger the number is that private a√ection extends to, the more apt men are, through the narrowness of their sight, to mistake it for true virtue; because then the private system appears to have more of the image of the universal system.''≤∞

Benevolence within such private systems is so widely admired, said Edwards, because it partakes of ''secondary beauty.'' ''As a few notes in a tune,'' he explained, ''taken only by themselves, and in their relation to one another, may be harmonious; which, when considered with respect to all the notes in the tune, or the entire series of sounds they are connected with, many be very discordant and disagreeable.''≤≤ Humans naturally admire the harmonies of benevolence on a purely human scale. The more complete the harmonies, the more they admire them. Yet if such benevolences, however attractive in themselves, are out of tune with the great symphony of God's love that animates the universe, they are ultimately discordant, rather than truly beautiful.

Like the other moral philosophers, Edwards believed that humans had an inbuilt moral faculty. Yet he saw it not as a reliable subjective sensibility so much as a rational ability to approve of proportion and harmony, as one might appreciate the proportions of a triangle or the harmonies of a melody. For instance, natural conscience most characteristically involves a sense of justice, or an appreciation of the harmony of acts and their appropriate consequences. All normal people have a sense of desert with respect to themselves, and they can develop a sense of justice for others by imagining themselves in other's places. Conscience tells people when they are out of harmony with their own best judgments or acting inconsistently with what they would approve in others.≤≥

This natural moral faculty is in fact, said Edwards, of great value for regulating society. Although the ultimately limited expressions of natural benevolence or its approval of acts of justice are not true virtue, they have ''a true negative moral goodness in them.'' ''By 'negative' moral goodness,'' Edwards explained, ''I mean the negation or absence of true moral evil.''≤∂ So Edwards could heartily endorse all acts of benevolence, compassion, justice, and the like, whether by individuals or governments, which limited vice. These were expressions of ''common grace,'' or gifts that God bestowed on all humanity. It was consistent with this view, for instance, that Edwards strongly supported the British military, even though he was appalled by the

∂π≠ The Presumptions of the Age

impiety and lax morals of most of its members. They were being used by God to restrain evil.

At the same time that Edwards granted the value of ''true negative moral goodness,'' or of the ''virtues'' of a limited purely human system of morality, he also insisted that nothing can be true virtue when the benevolence is not first of all benevolence to God or to most of the being in the universe. ''Such a private a√ection, detached from general benevolence and independent on it, as the case may be, will be against general benevolence, or of a contrary tendency; and will set a person against general existence, and make him the enemy to it.'' The reason for this sharp dichotomy is that one's private a√ections, apart from God, no matter how much extended to family, community, or nation, will inevitably be one's highest loyalty, above loyalty to God or to Being in general. ''For he that is influenced by private a√ection, not subordinate to regard to Being in general, sets up its particular or limited object above Being in general; and this most naturally tends to enmity against the latter. . . . Even as the setting up another prince as supreme in any kingdom, distinct from the lawful sovereign, naturally tends to enmity against the lawful sovereign.''≤∑

True love, Edwards pointed out, is to identify our interest with that of others.≤∏ What makes others happy makes us happy. In an essentially interpersonal universe persons are either united to or divided from each other by their a√ections. One's love can either be confined to some limited set of created persons and things, or it can be first of all love to the Creator which will entail love to all being. Characteristically, Edwards was insisting that the only important question in life is whether one is united to God or in rebellion against God. If united with God (which for Edwards was always an ongoing process), then one will learn to love all that God loves—which includes benevolence and justice toward others. God's happiness will be our happiness.

True virtue is ultimately distinguished from its imitators by motive or disposition. This crucial point needs to be underscored because it reflects Edwards' overall vision of a personal universe and a√ective religion. True virtue grows out of a disposition to true love. True love is the widest possible a√ection for persons and all that is good (being) in the universe. It is doing good for its own sake—for its beauty. Merely natural ''virtue,'' which superficially may look very similar, is ultimately motivated by humans' natural inclinations to love themselves and their own kind.≤π

In The Nature of True Virtue—an intellectual gem by any standard—

The Presumptions of the Age ∂π∞

Edwards was challenging the project that dominated Western thought, and eventually much of world thought, for the next two centuries. The grand ideal of that hopeful era was that humans would find it possible to establish on scientific principles a universal system of morality that would bring to an end the destructive conflicts that had plagued human history. Only after the first half of the twentieth century, when the clashes of such ideals had led to the bloodiest era in history and threatened to annihilate humanity, did much of the faith in that project collapse, even though there were no clear alternatives to put in its place.

Edwards' recognition of the vast importance of the assumptions that lay behind such e√orts and his insight into their faults arose not because he was so far ahead of his time, but rather because his rigorous Calvinism—and his position in a distant province—put him in a position to critically scrutinize his own era. His theological commitments alerted him to the momentous implications of trends that were already formidable in Britain when he first came onto the intellectual scene and which during his lifetime advanced rapidly even in New England. Edwards was a thoroughly eighteenth-century figure who used many of the categories and assumptions of his era to criticize its trends. Although he may have underestimated the short-term benefits of the emerging culture, he had genuine insight into the emptiness of its highest hopes.

C H A P T E R ≤Ω kl The Unfinished Masterworks

s Edwards set o√ for Princeton in January 1758 he had to resign himself to the reality that it might be God's will that he not finish the two ''great works'' he had described in his letters to the college trustees. But at only fifty-four years old, he was certainly going to try. There was much to make him believe that these works were within God's purposes. Such comprehensive treatises, he was convinced, could be bulwarks in the battles against fashionable infidelity.

Much of the work was already done. The wagon that carried his essentials to Princeton probably contained boxes in which his massive notebooks were carefully wrapped—notes on Scripture, typology, miscellanies, sermons, and much that he could hardly do without. These notebooks would fill many thousands of pages when published (a process that has taken two and a half centuries). Some of the ''Miscellanies'' were small treatises in themselves and were su≈ciently complete to be published in nineteenth-century collections of his works under such topics as ''Evidences of Christianity'' (with subtopics on prophesies, miracles, the future state, Scripture, faith and reason, moral government, ''Mahometanism,'' ''the Jewish Nation,'' ''Mysteries of Scripture, ''Deity of Christ,'' ''God's Moral Government,'' ''Endless Punishment,'' ''Divine Decrees,'' ''Satisfaction for Sin,'' ''Faith,'' ''Perseverance of the Saints,'' ''Angels,'' ''the Devil,'' and ''Heaven''). Doubtless he was referring to some of these items when he told the Princeton trustees, ''I have also many other things in hand, in some of which I have made great progress.''∞

The mystery, however, to which we do not have a complete answer, is what the two other masterworks would have looked like. He referred to each as a ''great work'' and surely thought of these complementary volumes as the

The Unfinished Masterworks ∂π≥

capstone of his career, works that would tie together in a comprehensive way some of the most important themes in his thought.

The Other ''Great Work'': The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments

In Edwards' account of these works, by far the most attention is given to his ''History of the Work of Redemption,'' which he described so intriguingly as something that would have been revolutionary, ''a body of divinity in an entire new method.'' Nevertheless, Edwards told the Princeton trustees that his heart was also set on another ''great work,'' ''The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments.'' He had ''done much toward'' this work and may have intended to publish it first. He had at least five hundred pages of it already drafted and a lifetime of daily biblical study to provide a ready base for the rest.≤

We might think of Edwards' unfinished works as analogous to the two great works that J. S. Bach did live long enough to finish in the 1740s, the B-Minor Mass and the Art of the Fugue. In each of these works Bach drew on a lifetime of achievement for one great summation. The subject of the B-Minor Mass is, of course, the same as that of ''The History of Redemption,'' although Bach was following a conventional mass format. In Bach's music one can readily find sensibilities regarding the glory of God, Christ's death and resurrection, the work of the Holy Spirit, and much else in Christian doctrine that would have resonated with the a√ections of the American theologian. The Art of the Fugue, in contrast, represents the Baroque scientist at work, attempting ''an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.''≥ Edwards' ''Harmony'' may be seen as a similar sort of technical work of a Baroque scientist, attempting the most elaborate explorations of the variations on a theme essential to the theologian's art.

Edwards may have wanted to complete the ''Harmony'' first because of the paramount importance of Scripture for everything else in his thought. In his daily life and work, biblical study had a priority for Edwards that is di≈cult for a biographer to convey. It was an activity, like prayer or family interactions, that was so habitual that it gets obscured in accounts of more unique events and works that frame the narrative from day to day and year to year. Yet all these are constantly present.

The di√erence between Edwards' biblical study and most of his other

∂π∂ The Unfinished Masterworks

daily routines is the immense record he left of his work on Scripture. ''I had, then, and at other times,'' he wrote in his ''Personal Narrative'' of his maturing as a Christian, ''the greatest delight in the holy Scriptures, of any book whatever.'' Throughout his life, he combined that delight with discipline.∂ Much of his work is found in entries in four large notebooks called ''Notes on Scripture,'' kept throughout his career and now published in well over five hundred pages. Another very large collection of commentaries is found in his ''Blank Bible,'' or ''Miscellaneous Observations on Scripture,'' which was a small printed Bible with interleaved pages for notes. From 1730 to 1758 Edwards made perhaps ten thousand entries, or an average of more than one entry for every weekday, in this collection alone. Meanwhile he produced well over a thousand sermons, all of which contained at least some brief exegetical work. Further, in most of his published works, he included exegetical sections, and some of these were extensive. Over half of The End for Which God Created the World and more than a third of Original Sin, for instance, consisted of expositions of Scripture. In addition was all that he had ''done much toward'' in drafting his proposed great ''Harmony of the Old and New Testaments.''∑ Everything else rested on Scripture, which was one of his great passions.

When Edwards studied Scripture, he did not simply sit in his study with the Bible and try to discern its meanings. Rather, he worked directly within a tradition of interpretation. He surrounded himself with standard commentaries, such as those of Matthew Poole (1624–79), Matthew Henry (1662–

1714), Moses Lowman (1680–1752), Philip Doddridge (1702–51), and others, and he was always on the lookout for more. When he declared a teaching to be ''biblical,'' he was doing so within the frameworks provided not only by earlier Reformed theologians but also by this commentarial tradition. For instance, the typological interpretations that were so central to his reading of Scripture reflected a long heritage. And one can find many of his prophetic and millennial interpretations anticipated in Lowman and other works. At the same time, Edwards regarded Scripture alone as truly authoritative, so earlier interpreters could be revised. The project of understanding Scripture's true meanings was an ongoing progressive enterprise to which Edwards hoped to contribute.∏

Edwards explained to the Nassau Hall trustees that his ''Harmony'' would be ''in three parts.'' The first would be a comprehensive compilation of the prophecies of the Messiah and of their fulfillment. This would demonstrate ''the universal, precise, and admirable correspondence between predic-

The Unfinished Masterworks ∂π∑

tions and events.'' On this topic he had nearly three hundred neatly written notebook folio pages, complete with tables and indexes.π The second part of the three-part harmony was to be on ''the types of the Messiah.'' This would display evidences of Old Testament persons and events as ''being intended as representations of the great things of the gospel of Christ.'' Edwards had also already drafted this part of the work in a notebook during the 1740s and had revised it, probably late in his Stockbridge years.∫ His great-grandson Sereno Dwight first published the ''Types of the Messiah'' among Edwards' Works, and it is some one hundred thirty pages as published in the Yale edition. The ''third and great part'' of the intended work apparently was mostly yet to come. It was to demonstrate ''the harmony of the Old and New Testament, as to doctrine and practice.'' If Edwards had more than one notebook on this topic, it has not survived.Ω

The surviving parts of Edwards' ''Harmony'' tell us much about his view of Scripture in addition to pointing to the centrality it had for his thought and life. Most prominently, they reveal how acutely concerned he was to defend traditional views of the Bible from attack. Since the late seventeenth century modern biblical criticism had been emerging as an important means for progressive intellectuals to free themselves from Protestant dogmatism. In an era of ecclesiastical establishments, when much of intellectual and political life was tied to the church, questions of biblical authority had immense implications for other areas of thought and society. Many of the secular dimensions of the Enlightenment depended on displacing biblical accounts of history and human nature. It is not surprising, then, that Edwards spent vast amounts of time preparing to answer biblical critics.

The attacks, which were already common when Edwards came on the scene, arose along several fronts. John Locke, for instance, who had written extensive biblical commentaries himself, had argued that reason should stand as a judge of what to believe in Scripture. Various late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century writers likewise asserted the priority of reason in questioning biblical accounts of the miracles and Christian claims concerning the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Others, following the lead of Thomas Hobbes, questioned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the historical accuracy of other biblical accounts. Much of this skepticism was canonized in Pierre Bayle's massive Dictionaire historique et critique (1697–

1702), the product of the son of a French Reformed pastor. The influential Dictionary, which included much ridicule of biblical claims, was updated and published in an English edition (1734–41). Many British writers entered the

∂π∏ The Unfinished Masterworks

debates over the Bible's reliability, and Edwards addressed much of his biblical study to those disputes. He read everything he could get his hands on and cited scores of such sources in his notebooks.∞≠

The crucial issue was the widely popular idea that reason should be the judge of revelation. ''Multitudes of free thinkers,'' he argued in his ''Controversies'' notebook, ''deceive themselves through the ambiguous or equivocal use of the word reason.'' Their ''blunder'' was in not making a proper distinction between two uses of ''reason.'' ''Sometimes by the word reason,'' he observed, ''is intended the same as argument or evidence . . . as when we say we should believe nothing without reason or contrary to reason . . . or against evidence.'' That legitimate use of reason as an essential tool should be distinguished from making the unjustified claim that reason should be the ''highest rule'' in judging Scripture. The latter would be to speak as though ''evidence and divine revelation [were] entirely distinct, implying that divine revelation is not of the nature of evidence or argument.'' It would illegitimately enthrone ''reasonable opinions'' that humans arrived at on their own as necessarily higher than what they could learn from special revelation. That would be like jumping from the fact that the eye is a necessary tool for seeing to claiming that it is the ''highest rule'' for seeing and then refusing to believe the novelties that one sees in the best microscope or telescope.

Those who set up reason as the ''highest rule'' often disparaged biblical accounts of miracles as being contrary to reason. In such cases they were improperly excluding one important type of evidence: reliable testimony. To illustrate, said Edwards, suppose you have long known a man of ''the soundest judgement and the highest integrity'' who brings back from a trip eyewitness accounts of ''some strange phenomena or occurrences'' that you would not have believed otherwise. It would be unreasonable to reject his accounts as ''not agreeable to reason.'' That would be judging his claims by making one's previous ''reasonable opinions'' one's highest rule but not taking into account the reasonableness of believing such a man's testimony.∞∞

It was ''contrary to all rules of common sense,'' Edwards argued in a late ''Miscellany,'' to reject specific teachings of Scripture as ''unreasonable'' while ignoring its overall character. Referring specifically to the Deist Matthew Tindal's notorious Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), which attacked many biblical claims as contrary to teachings of nature and reason, Edwards pointed out that people commonly accepted many seemingly unreasonable propositions because they followed from some larger rational principle. Drawing on the principles of ''common sense'' philosophy, Edwards noted that ''number-

The Unfinished Masterworks ∂ππ

less truths are known only by consequence from the general proposition that the testimony of our senses may be depended on.'' Or the same could be said of reliable knowledge that depended on memory or the testimony of others. ''Thus,'' said Edwards, ''there are many things that I am told concerning the e√ects of electricity, magnetism etc. and many things that are recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which I have never seen, and are very mysterious.'' If such things were well attested, their mysteriousness ''is no manner of objection against my belief of the accounts, because from what I have observed and do know, such a mysteriousness is no other than is to be expected in a particular and exact observation of nature.''

As in nature, so even more in Scripture, one should expect mysteries that by themselves would seem contrary to reason. Here Edwards was following the line of argument best known in Bishop Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion (1736), which maintained that the di≈culties and mysteries attending acceptance of Scripture are no greater than those attending acceptance of wellaccredited laws of nature. ''Di≈culties and incomprehensible mysteries,'' wrote Edwards, ''are reasonably to be expected in a declaration from God, of the precise truth as he knows it, in matters of a spiritual nature.''

Inevitably God would have to deal in mysteries in a revelation that concerned matters beyond human comprehension, such as the nature of human souls, the relation of time to eternity, how a perfect God might permit evil, and much else. Equally complex were the mysteries of God's grand moral system, particularly in dealing with evil and ''the most extreme calamities, in which it had been involved by the malice and subtly of the chief and most crafty of all God enemies.'' God in his ''unsearchable and absolutely infinite wisdom'' pursued ''his deepest scheme, by which mainly the grand design of the universal, incomprehensibly complicated system of all his operations, and the infinite series of his administrations, is most happily completely and gloriously attained.'' Surely in revealing this humanly incomprehensible scheme in a ''large book, consisting of a vast variety of parts'' and genres, ''all connected together; all united in one grand drift & design,'' we should expect many particulars that we do not understand.

A premise of all Edwards' theology—that humans must face the stark implications of the infinite di√erences between a perfectly good eternal God who governs the immense universe and his finite imperfect creatures—led him to his firm conviction that special revelation provided the only hope to know God's ways. Further, it led him to expect that such a revelation must involve mysteries beyond human comprehension. Some subjects, such as

∂π∫ The Unfinished Masterworks

eternity, or the soul surviving without the body, or many other aspects of spiritual reality, were so much beyond human experience as to be like colors to a blind person. One might accept explanations about such things on the basis of good testimony and consistency with other experience, yet ultimately they would remain mysteries.∞≤

All the controversial doctrines that he defended were teachings he held simply because he was sure they were taught in Scripture. God's sovereignty in choosing those whom to save, the imputation of Adam's sin to the whole race, the unacceptability in God's eyes of even the best natural virtue, the chasm between the regenerate and the unregenerate, the eternity of punishment for sin, and much else were biblical teachings one might not dare ignore, however mysterious or unreasonable they might seem. Edwards spent much intellectual energy arguing that these revealed doctrines were reasonable, or at least not necessarily unreasonable, and that therefore they could be consistent with the moral government of a benevolent deity.

In that concern—to justify the ways of God to man—Edwards was akin to the progressive philosopher-theologians of his age, yet he radically di√ered from most of his contemporaries in that he was not willing to judge God by eighteenth-century standards of moral law. God, for Edwards, was not to be understood as something like the most virtuous of all humans. Rather, because Edwards took so seriously the immensity of the gap between the ways of the infinite and eternal God and the limits of human understanding, he was willing to make the best of the biblical accounts, as counterintuitive as they might sometimes seem. Upon rigorous examination, he consistently claimed, those accounts could be proved more consistent with reason and experience than any alternatives, even if deep mysteries remained.

Edwards regarded Scripture as like God's works in creation. Each was ''a system'' and ''the voice of God to intelligent creatures.'' Each pointed to the mysteries of God's ''unsearchable wisdom.'' Yet each was also intended to be a guide to rational creatures.∞≥

Viewing Scripture as designed by God to reveal, Edwards dismissed objections from modern critics who questioned Calvinist interpretations on the grounds that ancient meanings might be di√erent from modern readings. ''They say the ancient figures of speech are exceeding diverse from ours, and that we in this distant age can't judge at all of the true force of expressions used so long ago but by skill in antiquity, and being versed in ancient history, and critically skilled in ancient languages.'' Nonsense, said Edwards. Such critics fail to consider ''that the Scriptures are written for us in these ages, on whom

The Unfinished Masterworks ∂πΩ

the ends of the world are come, yea were designed chiefly for the latter age of the world, in which they shall have their chief and, comparatively, almost all their e√ect.'' So God could not have been planning that one had to be an expert in ancient languages and history in order to understand the essential meaning of the Scriptures. Rather ''they were written for God's people in these ages, when at least ninety-nine out of an hundred must be supposed incapable of such [expert] knowledge.''∞∂

Nonetheless Edwards studied ancient languages and history as avidly as he studied everything else. He kept a notebook titled ''Hebrew Idiom,'' in which he made lists of Hebrew words as he studied Scripture in the original. He o√ered Hebrew as the one language he might teach at Nassau Hall as a way of honing his own skills. He copied passages from authorities on ancient history into his notebooks. Further, he would have yielded to no one in his conviction that common people should be guided by a learned clergy. Yet he could not believe that God would have revealed Scripture in a manner that it could be interpreted by scholars only. ''It is to be considered that this [Scripture] is given for the rule of all ages; and not only of the most learned, and accurate, and penetrating critics, and men of vast inquiry and skill in antiquity.'' If the essentials of Scripture were that di≈cult to understand, ''how unequal and unfit is the provision that is made! How improper to answer the end designed!'' Almost as though he anticipated the age of hermeneutics he continued: ''If men will take subterfuge in pretences of a vast alteration of phrase, through diversity of ages and nations, what may not men hide themselves from under such a pretence! No words will hold and secure them. It is not in the nature of words to do it.''∞∑

Edwards tried to view Scripture from God's perspective, as intricately designed luminously to reveal the great end of creation, God's redemptive love. God had built into Scripture, as he had into nature and the rest of history, elaborate harmonies all resolved in the grand theme of Christ's love. Hence at the center of the three-part ''Harmony of the Old and New Testaments'' were Edwards' typological studies of how numerous Old Testament people and events pointed to Christ. All reality was of one Christological piece. ''I am not ashamed to own,'' Edwards wrote in his ''Types Notebook,'' ''that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words; and that the multitudes of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by these things.''∞∏

∂∫≠ The Unfinished Masterworks

By amassing the evidence for the typological and Christological harmonies of Scripture, Edwards was countering the skeptical critics by fighting the battle on a higher ground. Edwards was simply not allowing the premise of the critics that Scripture was to be interpreted like other books. If Scripture were in some sense a revelation of God—as most of the critics still allowed—

then its design must contain excellencies that far transcended the vicissitudes of the historical circumstances or the limits of the language in which it happened to be revealed. Understanding the ancient language and history would be a valuable enterprise, just as the natural philosophers should profitably study natural phenomena. Yet to regard such historical study as the key to understanding the meaning of Scripture would be as great a mistake as to regard the laws of physics as the key to understanding the meaning of creation.

Scripture could not be defended, in Edwards' view, if one conceded the critics' claim that it was most essentially a product of human history and then tried to fend o√ this or that claim about its accuracy. Edwards was concerned to answer particular criticisms. For instance, his longest entry (nearly fifty pages in the Yale edition) in his ''Notes on Scripture'' was on ''Whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch,'' a topic on which he had written well over a hundred pages in an additional notebook. Yet he kept the argument on his own ground. The Mosaic authorship fit with all the other evidence within Scripture itself. Essentially he argued in numerous ways for the internal consistency of Scripture. In the same vein, he showed how one could reconcile the four seemingly disparate Gospel accounts of the events surrounding Christ's resurrection.∞π

Much of his proposed ''Harmony'' would likewise demonstrate internal biblical consistency. He would assemble overwhelming evidence of prophecies that had been fulfilled, of types that pointed to Christ, and of doctrines that agreed in the two testaments. Edwards assumed that if the Bible was a special revelation of God, it must have a consistent design. Once one recognized Scripture's Christocentric redemptive purpose, then all the evidence could be decisively shown to be part of a harmonious whole.∞∫

The question of biblical authority, Edwards was convinced, could not be entirely settled apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, who would give people the spiritual sense intuitively to see the beauty of the truths it contained. Scripture had excellencies that were there for anyone to see. Yet sin could ''blind the mind,'' just as ''natural temper oftentimes very much blinds us in secular a√airs; as when our natural temper is melancholy or jealous,

The Unfinished Masterworks ∂∫∞

cowardly, and the like.''∞Ω Only if the Holy Spirit removed the blinders of sin would one immediately see the luminous truths of Scripture and it superiority to all other books.

Arguments might occasionally convince someone of the high probability of historical claims, but seldom to the extent that one would stake one's life on them alone. Any historical claim could be questioned. As he had written in Religious A√ections: ''How do I know when these histories were written? Learned men tell me these histories were so and so attested in the day of them; but how do I know that there were such attestations then?'' Although external evidences of the truths of Scripture were important, they were not su≈cient without the internal evidence of ''a sight of its glory.'' Only with the spiritual sense that provided direct experience of the divine excellencies revealed in Scripture would one ''run the venture of the loss of all things, and of enduring the most exquisite and long-continued torments, and to trample the world under foot, and count all things but dung, for Christ.'' If Christians had to wait until scholars answered all the objections to the truth of Scripture, ''miserable is the condition of the Houssatunnuck Indians, and others, who have lately manifested a desire to be instructed in Christianity; if they can come at no evidence of the truth of Christianity, su≈cient to induce 'em to sell all for Christ, in no other way but this.''≤≠

Edwards' eagerness to complete his Harmony reveals the urgency he felt in demonstrating how the Bible was a unique God-given book. He had spent a lifetime collecting arguments on that topic and seems to have spent increasing time in his later years answering specific critical challenges to biblical history. At the same time, characteristically, he did not see the question of biblical authority as settled simply by arguments. Ultimately, the truth of Scripture, like God's redemptive work itself, would be recognized only through the illumination of the Holy Spirit. A scholar could show the way especially by pointing out the Bible's marvelous harmonies and also by clearing the path of some critical obstacles. Nonetheless, seeing the perfections of God's revelation was of one piece with being given the eyes to see God's redemptive work in Christ.

''A Body of Divinity in an Entire New Method''

As Edwards traveled to Princeton, he especially hoped that his presidency would not too long delay his projected ''History of the Work of Redemption.'' He envisioned it as the culmination of his life's work, a universal extension of

∂∫≤ The Unfinished Masterworks

the themes to be explored in ''The Harmony of the Old and New Testament.'' All history, prophecy, types, and doctrine would center in Christ's redemptive work. Clearly the ''History of the Work of Redemption'' would contain some basic material from the 1739 sermon series of the same title. Yet, just as certainly, it would have been far more ambitious than that largely narrative work. What did Edwards have in mind when he described this magnum opus in such revolutionary terms?

We must begin with a close look at his account in his letter to the Princeton trustees. ''I have had on my mind and heart,'' he wrote, ''(which I long ago began, not with any view to publication) a great work, which I call A History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of an history, considering the a√air of Christian theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ; which I suppose is to be the grand design of all God's designs, and the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees; particularly considering all parts in the grand scheme in their historical order.''

After summarizing the events of the history of redemption, he described his approach. ''This history will be carried on,'' he proposed, ''with regard to all three worlds, heaven, earth and hell: considering the connected, successive events and alterations, in each so far as the Scriptures give any light; introducing all parts of divinity in that order which is most scriptural and most natural: which is a method which appears to me the most beautiful and entertaining, wherein every divine doctrine, will appear to greatest advantage in the brightest light, in the most striking manner showing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole.''≤∞

Throughout his career Edwards had aspired to write some great masterwork that would vindicate the faith against its detractors. In 1729 or 1730 he outlined ''A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted.'' That design had been conventionally systematic.≤≤ Sometime after preaching the History of Redemption sermons in 1739, however, Edwards abandoned this earlier plan and conceived of his revolutionary ''entire new method.''

What would this comprehensive theology ''thrown into form of an history'' have looked like? What was the significance he saw in this ''entire new method''? The completed masterwork would have included much of the straightforward historical narrative from the History of Redemption sermons, but that core narrative would have been surrounded and interspersed

The Unfinished Masterworks ∂∫≥

with theological discourses on every subject ''in that order which is most scriptural and natural.'' In e√ect, Edwards would have been attempting to combine the ''History of Redemption'' with the ''Rational Account,'' except that on a number of polemical topics he could refer readers to his more extended theological arguments in other published treatises and dissertations.

We can get some glimpses of what Edwards had in mind from three notebooks on the ''History of Redemption,'' which he began in Stockbridge around 1755 and were among the things he was working on when he received the call from Princeton. The extraordinary physical quality of the first of these notebooks is worth pausing to notice. It is 123 numbered pages of all sorts of scraps of paper of various shapes and sizes, sewn with a cover. Early pages are printer's proof from Joseph Bellamy's True Religion Delineated. Edwards then seems to have rummaged for any other paper he could get his hands on. A number of pages are copies of the o≈cial proclamation in Northampton of the marriage of Sarah Jr. and Elihu Parsons. One page is a draft of a prayer for ailing Deacon Clark. Others are from drafts of letters or a title page from his farewell sermon. Many of the irregularly shaped pages seem to be trimmings from the fans that his family was producing for sale in Boston.≤≥

This first notebook contains a number of outlines that Edwards was sketching out. One of the last entries reads: ''Title. The Nature and History of Redemption,'' a title that better suggested the work's dual character. He also indicated how he hoped to handle the awkward task of interspersing the historical narrative with theological expositions. ''Let there be large marginal notes at the bottom of the page,'' he wrote, ''and the reflections and doctrinal observations and disputations [?] be in them as I go along. Let rational proofs be o√ered of such things wherein this scheme di√ers from that of the Arminians.''

The cosmic history would begin with a substantial theological prologue. One note says, ''first part concerning the cause of the work of Redemption and of the trinity. That the holiness of God consists in love to himself.'' This exposition would have again rung the changes on the great theme he had sounded in The End for Which God Created the World but would have added some of the trinitarian motifs that he omitted from the earlier work.≤∂ After that topic and perhaps some reflections on the decrees of God, he would have presented an account of the rebellion and fall of the angels and then the fall of the human race. ''One general observation at the beginning'' he reminded himself, was that ''this a√air was always carried on between Christ and Satan.''

As to the history of earth, which was still to be the centerpiece of the

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

From Edwards' ''History of Redemption'' notebook, which reused his Farewell Sermon for paper

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