The Integrative Biblical Philosophy Of Jonathan Edwards: Empiricism, God, Being, And Postmillennialism

By Michael D. Gibson

[Michael D. Gibson is a student in the Advanced M.Div. program at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.]

I. Introduction

The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards, known most notably for his spirit quaking sermon ”Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is also recognized as one of the most startlingly brilliant philosophical thinkers ever produced on the continent of North America.[1] Unlike Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who believed that that which is philosophical is not Christian and that which is Christian is not philosophical,[2] Edwards most definitely sees a perfect harmony between Christian theology, doctrine, and philosophy. Edwards, then, has become an important figure in synthesizing Enlightenment philosophy and Christian theology. As a philosophical theologian, Edwards bridges the theological- philosophical gap through creative appropriation of the philosophical developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially Lockean empiricism and Newtonian science, in his reaffirmation of the Augustinian-Calvinistic theological tradition of Puritan New England.

The philosophical thinking of Edwards revolves around the theological conceptions of God in the physical universe. Edwards seeks to provide a philosophical foundation for examining the theological structures of God, the universe, history, man, and nature. It is axiomatic in Edwards that God is the absolutely sovereign and eternally perfect ground of all existence and creativity. The created world is a network of divinely established laws (“dispositions” or “habits”) whose ultimate end is to know and to love God. History and nature are inherently dynamic and purposeful, but their own dynamic life becomes actual only as they actively participate in, and actively function as, the medium of God’s own life in time and space.[3] What results from this recasting of Christian thought in the frame of philosophical understanding is a novel and dynamic perspective on God, the world, and history. Edwards’s dispositional ontology, which underlies his conception of the being of God and his interaction in the created world, is the reflection of the originality and unity of his philosophical theology. The developmental thought of Edwards, streaming through the corpus of his writings, seeks a rational realization of a philosophical understanding of the Christian faith, and it undertakes a metaphysical reconstruction and reconception of the traditional Western understanding of the nature of reality[4] which Edwards recasts as a dynamic network of dispositional forces and habits.[5] Edwards’s philosophical ideals, which produced the time transcendent modification of concurrent philosophical and theological thought, are the result of an integration of the theistic science of Newton, the Empirical process of observation in Locke, and a Puritanistic biblical world view. The dynamic perspective on reality in Edwards provides a radical understanding of the doctrines of the Christian faith regarding the existence and ontological being of God, and this capacity of his philosophical theology allows him to assert in the strongest possible terms his theological tradition of Calvinist Puritanism within a thoroughly modern philosophical framework. It is precisely at this point that Edwards is not only historically important but also a rich resource of insight even for the philosophical-theological tasks of the twenty-first century.[6]

II

The evidence within the body of Edwards’s writing signifies the process of his working out his philosophical thought with a definite awareness and understanding of the philosophical and scientific developments of his day.[7] The basic quandary that seventeenth-century thought bequeathed to Jonathan Edwards and his contemporaries is that of revising the Aristotelian and Scholastic schools of thought to reach a perspective that could accommodate the new methods and categories of thought presented by the Enlightenment philosophical and scientific communities. The limitations of the Aristotelian-Scholastic model can be seen in the inadequacy of the old metaphysics of substances and forms to function as the foundation of the intellectual framework in an age that increasingly thought of reality in terms of motion, power, and relational laws.[8]

The empirical and experimental methodology of mechanical science and empirical philosophy quickly rendered the notions of substance and substantial forms obsolete.

Upon reading Newton (especially the Queries at the end of the Optics) Edwards took up the idea of universal gravitational attraction, applying it wherever he could in cosmology, physics, and optics. Edwards enthusiastically embraced the findings of mechanical science, yet Edwards’s thoughts were much more given to reflection upon the power and wisdom of God in contriving the whole system of nature. “Natural Philosophy” contains a series of articles on this theme, beginning with LS No. 14,[9] where Edwards notes “the great wisdom that is necessary in order thus to dispose every atom at first, as that they should go for the best throughout all eternity; and in the adjusting by an exact computation, and a nice allowance to be made for the miracles which should be needful.” Each of the succeeding passages on the theme takes its departure from the conception of nature as a system of atoms which is exactly determined by universal laws.[10] In them Edwards celebrates, not only the regularity and beauty of the world, but the manner in which the succession of events has unfolded from the first creation and will continue to unfold to the end of the world, according to the original plan of providence. Hence, in the original creation of the chaoses of atoms, God so ordered that, “with established laws of matter, [these] were brought into those various and excellent forms adapted to every of God’s ends—omitting the more excellent works of plants and animals, which it was proper and fit God should have a more immediate hand in.”[11] The philosophical ideas found within Newton’s writings act as a base for Edwards’s own understanding of the universe, whereby he develops a philosophical approach (appropriating the findings of Newton, et al.) to the essential questions of theology.

Edwards responds philosophically and theologically to the foundational views and theories of science and philosophy, certainly regarding the inherent nature of the universe, and the natural make up of the visible cosmos. To Edwards, the universe is the ontological display of God’s creative work (Gen 1:1–2; Ps 19:1–6), and the one necessary, contingent element of the universe is God, not matter.[12] God, therefore, designed and ordered the whole of the cosmic sphere to display his power and glory and sovereignty, and through our observations of the universe, one may see the nature of God. Edwards assembled a philosophical conception of the universe, relating Newtonian theories of gravitation, atomic order, and movement to a thoroughly theological understanding of God in relation to the ontological aspect of the created order; and, Edwards posits a philosophical and theological comprehension of the teleological end of the universe, including the atomic elements, as being a direct component of the being of God, entirely subordinate to the absolute supremacy and sovereignty of the Divine Being, in whom the existence of all things consists (Col 1:15–18; Eph 1:10; 1 Cor 8:6; Rom 11:36; John 1:3).

Here, as in the multitudinous entries in Edwards’s philosophical essays, he expounds the theories he found in the British realms of science and philosophy,[13] through which Edwards develops an integrative philosophy, which streams through the course of his writings (philosophical, ethical, scientific, and theological). This shows his synthesis of Enlightenment thought, especially flavored by Newtonian[14] and Lockean ideas, but which is framed by a certain biblical world view.

III

“Natural Philosophy” and “The Mind” are connected with Edwards’s early efforts to compose major philosophical treatises, and these are to be regarded as philosophical journals which show the progress of his thought as he moved forward on his projects. It is possible to study the development of his philosophical thought as it is reflected in them, as his thought crystallized into fixed principles.

In “Natural Philosophy” Edwards reflects upon the arguments regarding materialism formulated in his earlier work, “Of Atoms.” He offers an imperative “to bring in an observation somewhere in a proper place, that instead of Hobbes’ notion that God is matter, and that all substance is matter, that nothing that is matter can possibly be God, and that no matter is, in the most proper sense, matter.” Here, contrary to the materialists’ claim that there is no substance but matter, Edwards posits that God alone is substance while matter is the immediate effect of the exercise of God’s infinite power (hence, matter is not substance) thus, God himself cannot be material. Edwards recognized the threat of materialism to orthodox Christian theology, and he ordered his efforts to establish by argumentation the reality and spiritual nature of God, and to show how the finite world, even as understood in the sciences, depends upon God’s infinite wisdom and the free and purposeful exercise of his infinite will for its creation and preservation.

The doctrine that all substance is matter was seen as a direct contradiction to the basic tenets of Christian natural theology. Hobbes’s metaphysics was taken by his critics to imply either an outright atheism, or else the radically heterodox theory that God is material. It denied the independent reality of any intelligent and voluntary spirits, and by implication the independent reality of an omniscient, omnipotent, and beneficent being. Materialism proposed that the universe is a complete, autonomous, and self-sustaining system of unintelligent bodies subject only to inherent, necessary, and mathematically exact laws of mechanical causation, so that all phenomena are reducible to explanations of the properties and motions of bodies alone, eliminating the conception of a divine and providential government of the world by a supreme Being.

Materialism had achieved a new plausibility in learned circles during the seventeenth century. The rejection of scholastic metaphysics and science, which was everywhere concurred with, had been stimulated in part by the rediscovery and study of the works of the ancient Greek materialists. The concept of matter itself assumed a new importance in physical theory. Although its real nature and its relation to space and time were the subject of major controversies, matter was no longer considered to be the mere formless substratum, but was regarded as having a real essence of its own, and as being sufficient by itself to account for the actual existence, movement, and properties of bodies. The metaphysical understanding of the physical world operated according to immaterial causes, fixed mathematical and mechanical laws; the created order conceived as an entirely autonomous, self-sustaining, and deterministic system.[15]

Edwards, paradoxically, maintains a theocentric view of the universe, while also displaying advocacy for the new physics. Edwards assumes that phenomena in nature are explained by the sizes, shapes, and motions of material particles, by the impulses and other forces that affect their motions, and the universal laws that govern them. He assumes a strictly deterministic universe in which every body affects every other according to those laws, and infers that God must have arranged the atoms with infinite care and wisdom in the course of creation that all subsequent events, even the miraculous, should follow according to the Divine plan.[16]

Edwards argues that the design of the world and the regular order of events in space and time cannot be attributed to the nature and operation of purely mechanical causes alone, but presuppose at least an intelligent and purposeful contrivance of the world machine in the original creation. Moreover, although his views on the nature and status of space, time, and the laws of physics changed as his thought developed, he argued from the beginning that they are not absolutely grounded in the inherent nature of matter and motion, but are due to the presence and voluntary operations of an omnipotent Being. The Newtonians whom Edwards read gave a special emphasis to this view. They directly associated the absolute space and time of Newton’s theory with the divine Being;[17] and they argued that the principle of universal gravitation cannot be explained by merely mechanical causes, but is a contingent principle by which bodies are ordered in the world that can have arisen only from the voluntary dispensation of an intelligent and omnipotent creator. Edwards echoes these claims in his comments that “infinite wisdom must be exercised in order that gravity and motion be perfectly harmonious,” and that “it is universally allowed that gravity depends immediately on the divine influence.”[18]

These arguments serve to show that the regularity of the world, the manner of existence of celestial bodies, depend upon God; and, further, the main point of Edwards’s response to materialism is that the very existence of bodies depends immediately upon the divine Being, that bodies do not exist by themselves as substances at all, but that all things emanate from the eternal being of God and are entirely ordered and moved in Him.

Herein, Edwards takes as his starting point the philosophies of Newton and Locke, seeing the observable phenomena of the temporal order, and deriving metaphysical principles for the operation of bodies and the activities of the human mind. In Newton, Edwards encounters the logical, mathematical principles of universal motion, wherein “we see only the outward figures and colors, we hear only the sounds, we touch their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells and taste the savors; but their inward substances are not to be known by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes.”[19] But, Edwards sees in these principles the necessary order of a universe which must be contrived, and designed by an infinitely wise and supreme Being, whom we may know through the ordered realm.[20]

IV

On the question of human history, Jonathan Edwards both inherits and modifies the Augustinian tradition. Like Augustine, Edwards sees history as governed by the intelligent design of the sovereign God, and thereby possessing an ultimate significance.[21] Again, like Augustine, Edwards saw the ultimate end of history as “transcending history” as such, since the finite and created existence receives an absolute meaningfulness only from an absolute and sovereign Creator and Governor who is more than the cosmos.[22] Edwards’s conception of God as internally complete, all sufficient, and sovereign enables him to reaffirm the Augustinian distinction between temporal existence and its creator.[23]

But, moreover, Edwards moves beyond Augustine. God, for Edwards, is a sovereign disposition, or law, a self-enlarging God,[24] whose being is radically immersed in time and space, bringing about an external existence of the Divine glory, accomplishing the work of redemption. For Edwards, Godseeks to redeem and sanctify history itself by God’s own self-extension through history.[25] Here, Edwards is a true heir of the Calvinist tradition, which asserts the intention of God to transform the entire creation—an imperative, motivated by the absolute sovereign will of the redeeming grace of God.[26] What Edwards did for the transformative power of the Augustinian and Calvinist tradition is to provide it with an appropriately dynamic metaphysical grounding, a dispositional reconception of God according to which God is fully actual (contra atomism) and complete, but is also really involved in temporal processes.

The unmistakable sense of history in Edwards’s thought is connected directly with his postmillennial views of biblical eschatology. Edwards, by putting the millennium on this side of the return of Christ, saw the ordinary course of history as the realm in which the Kingdom of God could be progressively realized though not absolutely consummated.[27] This does not indicate that Edwards held the belief that humanity could effect its own salvation, and that it was capable of ushering in the Age marked by peace and blessing of a thousand years. But Edwards emphatically believed that it was God who could and would do both within history.

Edwards’s postmillennialism and the accompanying positive view of history are properly understood within the framework of his dynamic conception of the ontological being of God. Edwards wrestled creatively with a theological question that is still producing lively debate today, two hundred and fifty years later. Specifically, Edwards sought to answer how the absolutely perfect and actual God can be truly involved in the movement of history. God, in Edwards’s thought, is actual and absolutely sovereign, but not timeless or immutable in the sense of the absence of movement and teleology.[28] The creation is the exercise of God’s own essence and constitutes an extension of the very life of the Divine being, reaffirming the Reformed position of humanity being in the image of God, while denying that the created order is part of the person of God (per pantheism, Aristotelianism). Time, in the created sphere, is real[29] and is the arena of God’s movement toward a consummated eschatology. History is the frame in which God works to bring his will and purposes to completion.

The thousand years, then, in Revelation 20, which are characterized by “peace and prosperity,” are depicted by Edwards as the true realization on earth of God’s end in creation, though God’s teleological properties are never ending. God carries out the goal of extending his eternal glory in time and space with a grand design involving the original work of the creation of the cosmos, the Fall of humanity, the redemptive work of Christ, and the completion of the Church. The external exercise of God’s divine providence (within the dispositional laws of the created order) takes the specific form of the work of redemption. This work reaches its consummation on the earth in the millennium. Edwards writes that “Christ and his Church shall … obtain a complete and entire victory over their enemies” at the beginning of this period; it will be a time of “great holiness,” “great peace and love,” and “perfection of beauty.” “All nations, in all parts of the world, on every side of the globe, shall be knit together in sweet harmony.” This will be “most properly the time of the kingdom of heaven upon earth,” “the principle time” of that kingdom.[30] The temporality of the “heaven upon earth” is clearly expressed by Edwards:

Millennium. ‘Tis probable that the world shall be more like Heaven in the millennium in this respect: that contemplation and spiritual employments, and those things that more directly concern the mind and religion, will be more the saint’s ordinary business than now. There will be so many contrivances and inventions to facilitate and expedite their necessary secular business that they will have more time for more noble exercises, and that they will have better contrivances for assisting one another through the whole earth by more expedite, easy, and safe communication between distant regions than now. The invention of the mariner’s compass is a thing discovered by God to the world to that end. 

Such a spiritual state as we have just described, has a natural tendency to temporal prosperity: it has a tendency to health and long life; and that this will actually be the case, is evident by Zech. viii. 4…. It has also a natural tendency to procure ease, quietness, pleasantness, and cheerfulness of mind.[31]

As C. C. Goen has said, “Edwards foresaw a golden age for the church on earth, within history, and achieved through the ordinary processes of propagating the gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit.”[32] The newness of Edwards’s thought does not lie in his conception of the millennium, but rather in his dynamic understanding of the essence and being of God as extended forth into time. God’s eternal glory is reproduced and dispensed into the temporal realm; there is a real sense in which God has a “real and proper delight, pleasure, and happiness” in seeing his glory extended into time. God would be “less happy, if it were possible for him to be hindered in the exercise of his goodness, and his other perfections in their proper effects.”[33] Time is the created receptacle where in the sovereign God aims to accomplish His goal, and cannot be hindered. The historic millennium is dependent upon Edwards’s doctrine of God’s creative activity and the extension of God’s glory within the fabric of time and space.

It is important to note that Edwards understands God to be transcendent and prior to the historical process as well as immanent within that process; it is the immanence of God within the historical process which involves his Providential movement of events and beings. This doctrine emphasizes God’s priority over temporality, including the temporality of the historical extension of God’s being in and through the millennium. God is already God without the creation of the world,[34] and in creating the world God did not aim at self-realization, but rather glorification.

God’s internal glory will always remain as a transcendent principle to and over any realization of the Divine “breaking in” in time, including the historical millennium. As Edwards posits in the “History of the Work of Redemption,” the thousand years of the millennial age will be followed by a time of apostasy, and then will be “superceded by further increases of God’s glory in the new heaven and the new earth” to be inaugurated by the second coming of Christ. “All the glory of the glorious times of the church on earth is but a faint shadow of this her consummate glory in heaven.” God’s breaking in through the history of redemption is a true extension of God’s glory, but is just a type or image of what is yet to be realized in the unending ages of eternity.[35]

This conception of the historical millennium as the replication of God’s glory in the temporal order, to be consummated with the final breaking in of God upon time in the second advent of Christ, is in Edwards a full realization of the being of God and the transcendent nature becoming fully immanent as the age of time and history is brought to a conclusion. Edwards draws a clear distinction between himself and the contemporary philosophy of England and Europe. As Edwards, throughout his writing, thinking and preaching, draws upon the insights of philosophy, he goes beyond and moves the realm of thinking from the hypothetical to the biblical. As he has imbibed, improved, and refuted the thinking of such figures as Newton, Reid, Descartes, and Locke, Edwards again shifts the paradigm of thinking in the philosophies of Kant and Hume.

In the doctrines of the millennium, Edwards ascends the Gap which Hume constructs, and he shatters the Wall which permeates Kant’s theories. Within Edwards is a completely knowable, and realized necessary Being, the first Cause, but he locates in Him the realm in which all things have their true existence and identity. Edwards overcomes the impasse created by the Gap and the Wall, which separates ontologically the temporal from the infinite, but also renders the knowledge of such as unknowable. Instead, Edwards presents God as the conclusive source of all things, all knowledge, all being, and as the initiation, and definition of reality. Further, the final stage in the temporal realm of time, space, and history, is the complete breaking in of the infinite upon the finite. As the Kingdom draws in, so the full being of God ushers the close of time, and the consummation of the purpose and plan of God within the created realm.

V. Conclusion

Jonathan Edwards stands as one of the greatest formative thinkers in Christian history and in the history of the fields of philosophy and theology. He becomes a critical link between traditional Calvinist thought and the evolving post-Enlightenment philosophy. Edwards’s work reveals a mind reconciling important theological truths within a philosophical framework and providing an important response to the burgeoning disciplines of philosophy and science with a realized biblical world view.

Notably, Edwards equips the evangelical church of the twenty-first century with a vast resource of philosophical and theological reasonings that are especially relevant to the issues with which the church is currently dealing. The church’s contemporary conflict in the area of open theism has only to seek out a response in the catalog of Edwards’s writings. In his treatise, The Freedom of the Will, Edwards offers a stinging rebuke to the raging controversy of his day: the battle between Arminianism and Calvinism. Edwards thoroughly identifies the key issues in the debate, and clearly, logically, and decisively refutes the Arminian system. Edwards addresses the disputed concepts of the extent of God’s divine knowledge, and his role in the volitional actions of humanity. The intrinsic value of this work, as it pertains to the modern church, is that Edwards assesses theologically and philosophically the foundational elements of the debate. Edwards centers his argumentation in a philosophical-theological context, defending the biblical concept of God. Edwards answers the Arminian objections to the Calvinistic perspective of God’s sovereign direction of the will, the vast and absolute nature of God’s determined knowledge, and the Arminian assertions of man’s moral and volitional free choice.[36] Additionally, Edwards provides a biblical framework for a philosophical definition and understanding of the will. It is here that Edwards finds foundational support in Locke.[37] Yet Edwards also provides an adequate refutation of the errant philosophical notions regarding God, humanity, and the will.

In Edwards, as illustrated in Freedom of the Will, the church finds a storehouse of philosophical-theological material that provides a full biblical understanding of the issues faced, not only in the eighteenth century, but in the twenty-first century as well. Edwards provides much relief in the current culture, for the writings of Edwards contain the correction of Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment thought of his time, which is the foundation of the postmodern world view. Edwards finds biblical grounding in the rational, logical science of Newton, a process of empirical thought in the philosophy of John Locke, refutation of atheistic science in the writings of George Berkeley,[38] and a theological system in the writings of Calvin and Augustine. Edwards provides a consistent, logical, Reformed system of categories for a philosophical understanding of God, humanity, the universe, and nature. In Edwards, the identity of God as the sovereign origin for life, knowledge, and being is clearly seen; and, his writings provide a rational defense of the breaking in of God into time, humanity, and history, so that the created order can have knowledge of God, and glorify him, which Edwards defines as the ultimate goal (τέλος) of God. These concepts are the conceit of Edwards’s philosophical understanding of theology, and he bequeaths to the modern church a way of exploring the philosophical issues of God, ourselves, and our world, while providing a solid footing and new conception of our old traditions in a Reformed, biblical world view.

Notes

1. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland: World, 1959), vi, 305.
2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 (trans. G. W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 5.
3. Jonathan Edwards, “Of Being,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards (ed. Wallace E. Anderson; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 6:202–7. This reference cited hereafter as Works (Yale ed.).
4. Within the sphere of Edwards’s New England, the traditional view was cast in the framework of an Aristotelian-Scholastic world view (see P. M. Harman [Heiman] and J. E. McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth Century Thought,” Historical Studies in Physical Sciences 3 [1971]: 233-306).
5. Vincent Tomas, “The Modernity of Jonathan Edwards,” New England Quarterly 25 (1952): 60-84.
6. Especially evident in the current theological discussions within evangelical circles regarding open theism, free-will theism, and process theology. See S. H. Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988): 4-7.
7. See Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); and William S. Morris, “The Genius of Jonathan Edwards,” in Reinterpretation in American Church History (ed. Jerald R. Brauer; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 29–65.
8. I.e., the result of the revolutionary publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, and Optics in 1704.
9. The referent LS is to the ‘Long Series’ of propositions found within the collection of essays entitled “Natural Philosophy,” “Of Being,” and “Of Atoms,” all contained in Works (Yale ed.); 6:173–295.
10. According to the theories that he read in the works of Newton, Descartes, Berkeley, and Reid.
11. Edwards, “Natural Philosophy,” Works (Yale ed.) 6:49.
12. Contra Platonism, Neoplatonism, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, etc.
13. For example, Edwards makes several references to a quotation found in Newton’s Optics, “So far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the First Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Natural Light” (348). Quoted in “Natural Philosophy,” LS No. 8; “Of Light Rays,” SS (Short Series) No. 40; and “Beauty of the World.”
14. James H. Tufts, “Edwards and Newton,” Philosophical Review 49 (1940): 609-22.
15. For the scientific and philosophical background of Edwards’ time, see especially S. E. Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (Ithaca, N. Y.: Camden Books, 1960).
16. “Natural Philosophy,” Works (Yale ed.), LS No. 14, 6:231.
17. In Optics, Query 28, Newton writes, “… does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself ?”
18. “Natural Philosophy,” LS Nos. 9, 23a, 6:230, 234–35.
19. Newton, Principia (London: General Scholium, 1713), 483.
20. Contra Locke’s comments in Book II, ch. 23, nos. 3–4 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690): “When we talk or think of any particular sort of corporeal substances, as horse, stone, etc., though the idea we have of either of them be but the complication or collection of those several simple ideas of sensible qualities, which we use to find united in the thing called horse or stone: yet, because we cannot conceive how they should subsist alone, nor in one another, we suppose them existing in and supported by some common subject, this support we denote by the name substance, though it be certain we have no clear or distinct idea of that thing.”
21. Contra Hume, the Cambridge Neo-Platonism, and Aristotelian philosophy.
22. John F. Wilson, “Jonathan Edwards as Historian,” CH 46 (1977): 5-18.
23. For more on Augustinian philosophy of history, time, and knowledge see Langdon Gilkey, Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury Press, 1976); and Ronald H. Nash, The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969).
24. See Lee, Philosophical Theology, 170–210.
25. Edwards, “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption,” in vol. 4 of Works (Yale ed.).
26. “Editor’s Introduction,” in Works (Yale ed.), 5:24–28.
27. This paper does not address objections to the postmillennial view (although this author is amillennial), rather it is a presentation of Edwards’s philosophically realized eschatology. See C. C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” CH 28 (1959): 25-40; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956): 217-39.
28. Edwards clearly believed that God was the cause of all movement and being, and, therefore, not immutable in this regards. He did, however, hold absolutely to the eternality and unchanging nature of God, contra Process theology and panentheism.
29. Contra the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Hume.
30. “A History of the Work of Redemption,” Works (Yale ed.), 1:302, 491–95.
31. “Miscellanies,” No. 262, Works (Yale ed.), 18: 207–8.
32. Goen, “New Departure in Eschatology,” 26.
33. “The End for Which God Created the World,” Works (Yale ed.), 2: 212–13.
34. Edwards maintains a strong Creator-creature distinction.
35. “History of the Work of Redemption,” Works (Yale ed.), 1: 505–6.
36. Freedom of the Will in Works (Yale ed.), vol. 1, sections I-IV.
37. In this essay, Edwards relies upon Locke’s understanding of the will as the common ground, and then expands upon this definition throughout.
38. Berkeley provided the antithesis to materialistic and atomistic philosophy concurrent with the Cambridge movement of Neo-Platonism, whereby Berkeley’s philosophical notion of being is that of perception, which provided a basis and rational explanation for the existence and Providential movement of God. See especially, Samuel E. Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy (4th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 283–89.