An Uncommon Union: Understanding Jonathan Edwards’s Experimental Calvinism

By William M. Schweitzer [1]

How do we describe Jonathan Edwards’s vision for the church? American church historian Darrell G. Hart gives us a helpful starting point with the term “Experimental Calvinism.” [2] Indeed, Edwards wrote a preface to a book by Joseph Bellamy called True Religion Delineated, or, Experimental Religion, As Distinguished from Formality on one Hand, and Enthusiasm on the other, set in a Scriptural and Rational Light. [3] Notice how the title is worded: true religion is “experimental,” as distinguished from formality (that is, a religion where external forms are essential but inward experience is not) on the one hand, and enthusiasm (where inward experience is essential but forms are not) on the other. Edwards concurred with Bellamy that religion must comprehend right forms as well as inward experience, and that this biblical faith could be described as “experimental.” [4] And Edwards had no problem being called a Calvinist. [5] So it seems that Hart is standing on fairly solid ground when he chooses the term “Experimental Calvinism” to describe Edwards’s vision for the church.

If we are agreed on that much, the question then becomes, how do we understand experimental Calvinism? Specifically, we are concerned with how the church transmits the Christian faith to her people. In his 2003 essay and in a 2005 conference paper, Hart implies that Edwards’s vision is preoccupied with inner experience and has little use for the forms that make up the visible church. [6] Worse, Edwards’s brand of religion emphasizes dramatic conversions to the point that the church ends up having no place for covenant children brought to faith through catechetical nurture. So, Hart wonders whether Edwards’s “laudable effort to detect signs of regeneration actually betray Reformed teaching on conversion and therefore compromise Calvinism’s doctrine of salvation,” and “undermine a churchly form of Reformed Christianity.” [7] Now, it ought to be said from the outset that this is no mere academic exercise. Hart is concerned about some very real pastoral problems no less than for the general state of the contemporary church. The reason why we must take him so seriously on this point is precisely because it is of the greatest importance. If Hart is correct about his suspicions about Edwards, then, far from appropriating him, we ought to be repudiating large swaths of his legacy.

But this article will suggest that there are better ways to understand Edwards’s experimental Calvinism that make such eventualities unnecessary. For instance, Hart points to the well-known “Personal Narrative” as evidence that Edwards understood his own conversion experience to be dramatic. [8] But while that might be a plausible reading, I think it is far more likely that the “Narrative” points us in the opposite direction—to a regeneration that was itself instantaneous, but the signs of which became clear to Edwards only over time, and may not have been all that dramatic. Secondly, Hart says that “[f]or Edwards, Christians come to faith through a dramatic encounter of soul-wrenching proportions,” and that he “was not content with external professions of faith.” [9] I want to look at evidence that suggests this characterization is not representative of Edwards’s definitive public statement on the matter.

Finally, Hart wants to point us to John Williamson Nevin as representing a better foundation for the church to build upon than Edwards. Nevin’s most famous work and the one to which Hart exclusively directs our attention was his critique of the Second Great Awakening, The Anxious Bench. [10] In it, Nevin draws a clear dichotomy between two competing ways of acquiring the church’s faith, the Bench and the Catechism. If Edwards is as problematic as Hart suggests, then we might expect him to line up rather decisively on the wrong side of Nevin’s analysis in The Anxious Bench. [11] But upon examination, things would appear otherwise.

“Personal Narrative”

So let us first take a look at Edwards’s “Personal Narrative.” Hart points to the “Narrative” as evidence that, inasmuch as Edwards considered his own example to be normative, he would have expected genuine regenerate experience to feature a dramatic conversion. [12] Hart contrasts Edwards with John Calvin, whom he argues never experienced “a decisive break with [his] former life”; and so these two great figures had correspondingly differing conceptions of conversion. [13] Hart duly notes that Edwards actually rejected the old Puritan morphology prescribing exactly how and in which steps people came to salvation, but yet thinks

...even if the morphology of conversion was not set or predictable, what was certain was that conversion rested on the mysterious movement of the spirit, imparting a new and spiritual sense to the convert, and that the change was dramatic, taking the believer from the depths of despair to the ecstasy of faith and love. [14]

This final point is important. If Edwards thought that legitimate conversions needed to be dramatic, and if we had appropriated his vision for the church, what would we do with people brought to faith through lifelong Christian nurture? We would not have any place for them; we would have to get them to a Finneyite revival meeting so they could walk the aisle and sit on the anxious bench. But what if Edwards didn’t even see his own conversion experience as all that dramatic?

We admit that there may be more than one way to interpret the “Personal Narrative,” just as would seem to be the case with Calvin’s account in the Commentary on the Psalms. [15] But concerning this crucial point as to whether Edwards had a dramatic conversion experience, at least one senior Edwards scholar would say no. Kenneth Minkema, who from his vantage point as the executive director of the Works of Jonathan Edwards project at Yale probably knows the Edwards corpus as well as anyone, has this take on the “Personal Narrative” in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards:

Though Edwards dwelt on his inabilities to fulfill his expanding desire for holiness, he did not identify his inability to locate a single moment of conversion as a defect in his experience. Instead, he portrayed conversion as a gradual process of enlightenment and a realization of grace that, like the document itself, was retrospective. He “never could give an account, how, or by what means,” he was “first convinced of divine sovereignty,” nor saw any “extraordinary influence” in it at the time, “nor a long time after.” His “delights” were “of a different kind” from before, his “sense of divine things” heightened, but he never gave them the name of conversion. As he had noted in the “Diary,” his own experience was different from what “divines” posited, and through that he came to realize that religion was varied. For Edwards, what mattered was not a normative process or an identifiable moment of regeneration, but the cumulative combination of affection and behavior, a formula he would elucidate in Religious Affections. [16]

Edwards couldn’t identify a single moment for his own conversion, and his experience could be characterized as a “gradual process”—an accumulation of recognizably regenerate affections and behaviors. The things in hindsight that proved to be highlights of his religious history did not, at the time, seem even to himself to be “extraordinary.” [17] As mentioned, Edwards was skeptical about establishing set paradigms for conversion, a point made by Minkema above. Even so, it could be that Edwards saw the totality of his personal experience as a useful example of what regenerate reality might look like. If that is the case, Edwards thought genuine regenerate experience might consist in a fairly inconspicuous, gradual accumulation over time, recognized more in retrospect than at the moment.

However, Edwards’s own history is only one part of the relevant evidence. Hart observes, “Edwards’ own experience of the new sense was just one important factor in the way his understanding of conversion developed. Another was Edwards’ own observation of the sorts of changes that took place in church members under his care.” [18] He then cites some of the dramatic experiences Edwards relates in his correspondence during the Awakenings. This, however, brings up an important question: did Edwards use examples of extraordinary individual experiences to construct new norms for legitimate Christian profession, or simply to substantiate the legitimacy of the revivals? For instance, Edwards published the revival experience of his wife, Sarah. [19] If we were to equate such examples with Edwards’s idea of legitimate conversion, then this incident in 1742 would have to be the moment of Sarah’s conversion. But are we to imagine that Edwards really thought of his own wife as unregenerate before this experience? [20] Surely not. [21] Indeed, Edwards himself pointed out the falsehood of such thinking in one of his first Awakening publications:

And many are doubtless ready to date their conversion wrong, throwing by those lesser degrees of light that appeared at first dawning, and calling some more remarkable experience that they had afterwards, their conversion; which often in great measure arises from a wrong understanding of what they have always been taught, that conversion is a great change, wherein old things are done away, and all things become new [II Cor. 5:17], or at least from a false arguing from that doctrine. [22]

Edwards critiqued his own people for holding a “wrong understanding” of the doctrine that conversion implies a “great change,” leading them to suppose that this requires some dramatic conversion experience. Yet Edwards clearly disabused them of such “false arguing” as far back as 1737; it would be rather injudicious to charge him with teaching or encouraging the very opposite.

Covenantal Professions Of Faith

Whatever their import, Hart acknowledges that these examples of religious experience cannot finally settle the question of where Edwards placed the boundaries of legitimate Christian identity. Not finding a ready definition of conversion in the corpus, Hart turns to Edwards’scharacterization in Religious Affections that emphasizes the necessity of significant, abiding change implied by the new birth. [23] Of course, we have just shown how Edwards considered any equation between this great inner, spiritual change and some dramatic religious experience to be “false arguing.” When push came to shove—and it did during the communion controversy—what actually constituted a passable profession of faith for Edwards? Did he really require some “dramatic encounter of soul-wrenching proportions” in order to validate them as believers? [24] Again, this is important. Hart is concerned about the very real pastoral problem of what we do with covenant children who may not have had some dramatic conversion experience. For an example, Hart points to Nevin’s own history as a pious young man—though it is ambiguous whether Nevin really considered himself regenerate at this point—falling afoul of the mechanical techniques of revivalism. [25] Hart implies that this kind of anti-covenantal spiritual malpractice is being repeated over and over again in churches that have taken their cues from Edwards, and thus has no real place for covenant children brought to faith through Christian nurture.

Thus the stakes are high when we look at what Edwards actually thought was an acceptable profession of faith. As most of us know, Edwards was ultimately expelled from Northampton for requiring his people to make a profession of faith before admission to communicant membership. And during this time, “Edwards composed, for the benefit of the Northampton Church Committee, sample professions that he would accept from applicants for full membership.” [26] Here are two of them:

I do now appear before God and his people solemnly and publicly to profess, so far as I know my own heart, the following things: namely that I do believe that there is one only living and true God, who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who is the great creator and supreme Lord of heaven and earth; and having been made sensible of his divine supreme glory and excellency, do choose him for my only God and portion, choosing conformity to Him and his service and the enjoyment of Him as my highest and sweetest good. And as my parents gave me up to Him in my Baptism, so now I profess to give up my self, my heart, and my all to Him.

And I hope I do truly find a heart to give up myself wholly to God according to the tenor of that covenant of grace which was sealed in my baptism, and to walk in a way of that obedience to all the commandments of God which the covenant of grace requires as long as I live.

If we were expecting Edwards to put words relating some dramatic conversion experience on the lips of his prospective communicant members, we would be quite disappointed. Edwards is ready to accept explicitly covenantal professions of faith without requiring any kind of experience other than that of infant baptism, and without the slightest reference to anything dramatic.

Hart also points to Edwards’s earnest “Resolutions” to help paint the picture of what his brand of piety looked like. [27] It is interesting, then, to read the entry Edwards made on the occasion of when he himself was received into communicant membership: “Resolved, frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God, which was made at my baptism; which I solemnly renewed, when I was received into the communion of the church; and which I have solemnly re-made this twelfth day of January, 1722-23.” [28] Edwards thought of his admittance into the Lord’s Supper as “renewing” what had first been done at his covenant baptism. Thus it is entirely explicable that he would not require anything more dramatic—or less covenantal—in the sample professions of faith he would later frame.

The Catechism

Finally, we come to the subject of Edwards’s attitude towards the Catechism. Hart wants to rehabilitate John Williamson Nevin by pointing to The Anxious Bench. [29] However wary we might be of his later writings, we should be grateful for this incisive and still-useful critique of Finneyite revivalism. In it, Nevin draws a clear dichotomy between the Bench and the Catechism, which are icons for two mutually exclusive ways of getting religion. The former is the revivalist way, as individuals entirely disconnected from their family and from all other moments in time; the latter, the age-old means of transmitting the faith covenantally and over time. Nevin thinks that one may have some of the trappings of the other, but that wholehearted use of one necessarily precludes the other: where the Bench prevails, “catechetical instruction, and the religious training of the young generally, are not likely to be maintained with much effect.” [30] Quite simply, “The Bench is against the Catechism, and the Catechism against the Bench.” [31] So what was Edwards’s practice with regard to the Catechism? Here again, we defer to a senior Edwards scholar, in this case George Marsden:

In morning devotions he quizzed [his children] on Scripture with questions appropriate to their ages. On Saturday evening, the beginning of the Sabbath, he taught them the Westminster Shorter Catechism, making sure they understood as well as memorized the answers. Edwards also catechized the children of the town and set for them research questions from the Bible. [32]

Not only was Edwards a diligent catechist of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, both for his own family and for the children of the town, he even devised his own “Questions for Young People” supplementary study questions on Bible knowledge. [33]

Beyond his adherence to traditional ministerial norms in terms of catechesis, it seems that Edwards viewed the Catechism as a means of conversion. In relating the circumstances of young Phebe Bartlet’s experience, Edwards refers to “three passages of [her] catechism that came to her mind” that were particularly used in her conversion. [34] Any revival-friendly parent who took such an example seriously would be all the more encouraged to catechize his child; the Catechism was a powerful means of bringing covenant children to saving faith. So when it comes to the simple question of Bench vs. Catechism, Edwards was manifestly on the side of the latter.

But even when we reflect more broadly on the vision for the church advocated in The Anxious Bench, it is not particularly obvious how it could be understood as representing a substantively opposed alternative to Edwards. The earlier Nevin, like Edwards, thinks that true revivals are part and parcel of the Christian religion:

All these things [such as tract societies and missions] are natural, direct utterances of the spirit of Christianity itself, and have no affinity whatever with the order of action represented by the Anxious Bench. The same thing may be said of revivals. They are as old as the gospel itself. Special effusions of the Spirit, the Church has a right to expect in every age, in proportion as she is found faithful to God’s covenant; and where such effusions take place, extraordinary use of the ordinary means of grace will appear, as a matter of course. [35]

It is doubtful whether Edwards ever expressed his hope for revivals in stronger terms than “the Church has a right to expect [them] in every age, in proportion as she is found faithful to God’s covenant.” Nevin, like Edwards, conceived his work of critiquing the false manifestations as befriending the genuine. [36] Nevin wasn’t ready even to condemn the Second Great Awakening as a whole, much less the First. [37] Concerning Edwards personally, he said, “Whitefield and Edwards needed no new measures to make themselves felt. They were genuine men of God, who had strength from heaven in themselves.” [38] If Nevin at this point saw his idea of the church to be as different from Edwards’s as Hart seems to think it was, he did not make this clear in The Anxious Bench. [39]

Beyond a common hope for revivals, The Anxious Bench seems to share with Edwards a concern to uphold the necessity of inner spiritual reality as well as right external forms:

Wherever forms in religion are taken to be—we will not say the spiritual realities themselves with which the soul is concerned, for the error in that shape would be too gross—but the power and force at least by which these realities are to be apprehended, without regard to their own invisible virtue, there we have quackery in the full sense of the term. Religion must have forms, as well as an inward living force. But these can have no value, no proper reality, except as they spring perpetually from the presence of that living force itself. The inward must be the bearer of the outward. [40]

Once again, I am not sure where Edwards stated his insistence upon inner spiritual reality any stronger than “[t]he inward must be the bearer of the outward.” The very thing that Nevin sets out to oppose in The Anxious Bench is precisely a bogus form—the Bench—that has no inner reality to go with it. Nevin, like Edwards, is against wrong forms and in support of genuine experience.

Likewise, Edwards is very much against a neglect of right external forms, and makes this an explicit part of his critique of the excesses of the Awakenings:

Another erroneous principle that there has been something of, and that has been an occasion of some mischief and confusion, is that external order in matters of religion and use of the means of grace is but little to be regarded: ’tis spoken lightly of, under the names of ceremonies and dead forms, etc.... ’Tis objected against the importance of external order that God don’t look at the outward form, he looks at the heart: but that is a weak argument against its importance, that true godliness don’t consist in it; for it may be equally made use of against all the outward means of grace whatsoever. True godliness don’t consist in ink and paper, but yet that would be a foolish objection against the importance of ink and paper in religion, when without it we could not have the Word of God. [41]

Recall for a moment True Religion Delineated, or, Experimental Religion, As Distinguished from Formality on one Hand, and Enthusiasm on the other. [42] Edwards is against forms lacking internal reality, but he is equally against the kind of inner experience that can characterize proper churchly forms as “ceremonies and dead forms” and dispose with the very “means of grace.”

Finally, Nevin seems even to share Edwards’s concern that correct affections should accompany knowledge in religion:

As a general thing, the movement of coming to the Anxious Bench, gives no proper representation of the religious feeling that may be actually at work in the congregation, at the time. It is always more or less theatrical, and often, has no other character whatever. A sermon usually goes before. But frequently this has no felt relation at all to the subsequent excitement, so far as its actual contents are concerned. [43]

Nevin criticizes revivalism because the feelings that lead someone to answer the appeal are simply the product of mechanical manipulation and have little to do with the content of the sermon—not as it ought to be, an authentic response to the preaching of the Word. Such a statement is hardly at variance with Edwards’s characteristic concern that appropriate affections should attend noetic truth. [44]

So, although we inevitably find very different emphases resulting from very different historical contexts, it does not appear that The Anxious Bench represents as much of a radically divergent alternative to Edwards’s experimental Calvinism as might have been supposed.

Conclusion

How are we to understand Edwards’s experimental Calvinism? Well, being experimental, it certainly demands internal spiritual reality in terms of experienced faith. But it seems that such experience does not have to be dramatic. Although experimental Calvinism earnestly prays for revivals, these revivals do not operate outside of the ordinary means of grace, but are, to quote Nevin’s apt phrase, an “extraordinary use of the ordinary means of grace.” [45] And experimental Calvinism clearly has a place for covenant children coming to faith through Christian nurture. Not only did Edwards make ample allowance for such to be the case for those desiring communicant membership at his church, but it may well be the way he understood himself. Finally, experimental Calvinism is not formalism, nor is it enthusiasm. It is the insistence upon right external forms and inner spiritual reality, the marriage of objective truth and genuine subjective experience that has, unfortunately, proven to be an “uncommon union.” [46]

Notes

1. This article is based upon a paper presented at the 13th Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, August 2009. My thanks to Stephen R. Holmes, Michael S. Horton, and Michael Bräutigam for their interaction on this subject.
2. D. G. Hart, “Jonathan Edwards and the Origins of Experimental Calvinism,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, eds. D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).
3. See Edwards’s preface in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 4: The Great Awakening (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), 568-70. Hereafter, the Yale Edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards will be indicated by Works and volume number.
4. Note that although Bellamy and Edwards were in full agreement on this point, Bellamy’s trajectory (and that of the New England Theology) would later diverge from Edwards. See Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, eds., The New England Theology, 1734-1852: America’s First Indigenous Theological Tradition, from Jonathan Edwards and the New Divinity to Edwards Amasa Park (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006).
5. “I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake: though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing in everything just as he taught” (Edwards, Freedom of the Will in Works, Vol. 1, 131).
6. See Hart, “Experimental Calvinism” and “The Appeal and Disappointment of Evangelicalism: Is Reformed Christianity Evangelical?” paper presented at the Reformation Heritage Conference (Douglasville, GA, 2005); available at www.grace-pca.net/GenericPage/DisplayPage.aspx?guid=7ACE10F4-3B6A-4307-AEAF-20F79C9BF712.
7. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 163; Hart, “The Appeal and Disappointment of Evangelicalism,” introduction.
8. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 163-65.
9. Ibid., 175-76.
10. John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 2nd ed. (Chambersburg, PA: The German Reformed Church, 1844).
11. In accordance with Hart’s example, I shall base any evaluation of Edwards in relation to Nevin solely on the criteria Nevin stated in The Anxious Bench. Nevin’s later work was indeed incommensurate with Edwards’s vision. See D. G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P & R, 2005).
12. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 163-65.
13. Ibid., 173-75.
14. Ibid., 167; emphasis mine.
15. Bouwsma’s interpretation—which renders the event Calvin called a “sudden conversion” into something gradual and in continuity with Calvin’s previous life—seems open to question. See William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10, cited in Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 174.
16. Minkema, “Personal Writings” in Stephen J. Stein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 50-51; emphasis mine.
17. Edwards, “Personal Narrative” in Works, Vol. 16, 792.
18. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 165.
19. See C. C. Goen, “Editor’s Introduction” to Works, Vol. 4, 69-70.
20. See George S. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 240.
21. See Edwards, Works, Vol. 16, 789.
22. Edwards, A Faithful Narrative in Works, Vol. 4, 178.
23. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 166.
24. Ibid., 175-76.
25. John W. Nevin, My Own Life: The Earlier Years (Lancaster, PA: Historical Society of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, 1964), 9; quoted in Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 173.
26. See editorial introduction to “Sample Professions of Faith,” MS, Works of Edwards transcriptions.
27. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 165.
28. Edwards, “Resolution” 42 in Works, Vol. 16, 754.
29. Hart, “Experimental Calvinism,” 171.
30. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 119.
31. Ibid., 120.
32. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 321; Edwards, “Questions for Young People,” MS, Beinecke, Works of Edwards transcriptions, quoted in Marsden, ibid., 568.
33. Edwards, Works Online, Vol. 39.
34. Edwards, A Faithful Narrative in Works, Vol. 4, 200.
35. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 26-27.
36. Ibid., 28-29; 31.
37. Ibid., 36.
38. Ibid., 56-57.
39. Again, what is under discussion is Nevin as we specifically have him in The Anxious Bench, following the terms of the discussion as Hart presents them. In later years, Nevin advocated a high-church theology that was not only out of step with Edwards but with the Westminster faith.
40. Ibid., 51-52.
41. Edwards, Works, Vol. 4, 545; emphasis mine.
42. Ibid., 568.
43. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 40; emphasis mine.
44. This is a concept that permeates virtually the entire Edwardsean corpus. Particular highlights would be Religious Affections as well as The End for Which God Created the World. See also “Miscellanies” 127 and 212, in Works, Vol. 13, 291; 342-43.
45. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 27; emphasis mine.
46. “Uncommon union” is the way Edwards used to describe his marriage with Sarah on his deathbed. See Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 494.