(“… if it be that you do not suffer damnation, you have a great work to do before you die.”)[1]Introduction
To examine adequately the history of the concept of preparation in Reformed theology, it is essential to note a distinction between two different ways in which the term was used. One may be called preparation for glorification.[2] This is preparation of an already regenerated individual for his final eternal state. He is working out his own salvation with fear and trembling. Since it is God who is at work within him, there is clearly no inconsistency here with the Calvinist dogma of moral inability which applies to unregenerate man. However, there is another type of preparation (more characteristic of Puritan theology) which has been erroneously interpreted by some as incipient Arminianism. This preparation for regeneration, or seeking, is done by an awakened sinner who hopefully seeks the gift of regeneration.
Examining the history of preparation in Reformed thought, it becomes clear that the preparation of the saint was universally accepted. God always used the means of grace in preparing his people for glory.
Norman Pettit, in a very useful study, The Heart Prepared, unfortunately attributes to Ulrich Zwingli the idea that God’s dealings with sinners are “absolutely arbitrary” and claims that he differed with later reformers, such as Calvin, who believed that God himself might prepare the unregenerate.[3] Zwingli in the very context of speaking of conversion as “the immediate act of God’s Spirit” declared “it is necessary that the Word be preached, through which God plants the faith.”[4] All Reformed theology always maintained that God himself prepares the elect unregenerate for regeneration through his providential provision of the means of grace.
So though the concept of God preparing his elect for conversion through the use of secondary means can be traced in Reformed thought back to its seeds in the Reformation, it remains to be shown how the concept of preparation for the man in general developed in Reformed thought.
John Calvin in his Institutes already conceived of preparation taking place in the unregenerate in general. He even entitles a chapter “Fallen Man Ought to Seek Redemption in Christ.”[5] Calvin speaks of the law convicting men of sin, and giving them an image of what they must strive for, so that “when they are called, they are not utterly untutored and uninitiated in discipline.”[6]
Though this line of thought can be found in many early Reformed theologians, it remained basically theoretical and was first actively applied through a separate theological link. This link was their concept of covenant children with its accompanying sign-infant baptism.
Many later Reformed theologians altered Zwingli’s view of baptism. Zwingli had made a point that the baptized children of the covenant were not necessarily elect, while other theologians, such as Heinrich Bullinger, maintained that the children of the covenant probably were elect.[7] Calvin’s emphasis on the probable election of covenant children was even more pronounced than Bullinger’s. He writes, “ ‘The offspring of believers are born holy, because their children while yet in the womb, before they breathe the vital air, have been adopted into the covenant of eternal life. Nor are they brought into the church by baptism on any other ground than that they belonged to the body of the Church before they were born.’”[8]
None of these theologians claimed that all children of the covenant would be saved. It was impossible to forget that the prime Scriptural examples of elect and non-elect born of the same elect parents were Jacob and Esau, both of them covenant children. Still, much strong and ambiguous theological language (like Calvin’s) spread confusion in Reformed circles.
A large portion of the Reformed community gradually came to believe that a covenant child should be considered regenerate until “the contrary became plainly evident.”[9] This philosophy when applied to child-rearing frequently led to a state of dead orthodoxy because the children (along with their parents) tended to assume their salvation, though many never had experienced God’s regenerating grace.
This view of covenant children clearly helped produce Puritan preparation for regeneration. The distinction between regenerate and unregenerate covenant children was almost totally obscured. Although it was theologically granted that some covenant children were reprobates, practically it was assumed that all were elect and regenerate. A nineteenth century South African Dutch child of the covenant provides a typical example of this mentality. David Livingstone[10] recorded that such children were merely required to memorize the Heidelberg Catechism in order to be received into communicant church membership. There was usually no inquiry into personal acceptance of Christ, that being assumed.
The Puritan enterprise in England was marked by great evangelistic zeal. The movement’s rise in the Anglican Church placed Puritan ministers in congregations in which virtually all the local inhabitants were mandatory church members. Through the precedent of covenant theology’s treatment of covenant children, it became clear that there were steps unregenerate men could take to enhance the possibility of their regeneration. As the doctrine developed initially from an ambiguity, many of the Puritans remained uncertain as to whether the individuals going through the stages of preparation were regenerate or not.[11]
William Perkins broke with this pattern of ambiguity. His work was the classic in preparation which the New England Puritans brought to the New World. Perkins made a clear distinction between beginnings of preparation and beginnings of composition. “Beginnings of preparation arise from the work of the Law and are not necessarily works of God’s Spirit.” “Beginnings of composition are the inward motions and inclinations of God’s Spirit” which are “the effect of regeneration begun.”[12] Other English Puritans, such as John Preston, followed Perkins and made similar distinctions.[13]
This doctrine of preparation for regeneration as well as for glorification was taken over to New England by the two most notable Puritan theologians of the first generation, Thomas Hooker and John Cotton. To name John Cotton as a defender of preparation is a moot point. Thomas Hooker’s extensive work on preparation, on the other hand, placed him on a level with Perkins for extensive examination of the preparation doctrine.
Hooker added a possible third type of preparation to the two already considered. He spoke of “saving sorrow” as distinct from “sanctifying sorrow” (i.e., preparation for glorification):
Now two questions must be answered—first, whether this sound sorrow be a work as cannot be in a reprobate. First I will show the order that this work hath to the other works. Second I will show the difference of this from sanctifying sorrow, and yet it comes to be a sanctifying sorrow.
For the order: first the heart in this work is not yet conceived to be in Christ …. undoubtedly the soul that hath this work upon it shall have faith powred into it ….
What is the difference of sound saving sorrow and sanctifying sorrow? First, there is a difference in preparation, secondly there is a difference in sanctification. This sorrow in preparation is a sorrow wrought upon me, my soul is passive, it is a patient under the hand of the Almighty, rather than any work coming from any spiritual ability in myself.
Sorrow in sanctification flows from a principle of Grace and from that power which the heart hath formerly received from God’s Spirit … in this the man is a free worker …
Many think that every saving work is a sanctifying work, which is false; for every saving work is not a sanctifying work …. [14]Thus Hooker conceives of a slightly different type of preparation. The person going through this preparation does not yet have faith or else his actions would be sanctifying ones, yet he cannot truly be called unregenerate for he is the passive recipient of God’s grace and “undoubtedly the soule … shall have faith powrd (poured) into it.” Thus it is neither a “preparation for regeneration” nor a “preparation for glorification.” It appears to be a preparation of a regenerate individual for faith en route to glorification and therefore a part of preparation for glorification. Only Hooker’s language, not his concept, is unusual.[15]
This concept seems quite unusual, until it is examined in the light of Hooker’s whole work. Hooker, like Perkins before him, was concerned with examining every stage a soul passes through on the road to salvation. Thus this state of preparation is probably a logical not a chronological one. The key is in Hooker’s reply to the question concerning what would happen if a person died in this state of preparation. Said he: that is an “idle question because it is impossible that he who is fit and ready will not receive the ‘Lord immediately.” Thus one in this preparatory state of sound sorrow would instantaneously respond by exerting saving faith before death. This appears the only and an easy way to reconcile the different statements he has made and show how he avoided the error of incipient Arminianism.
John Cotton was a preparationist, but one of quite a different breed from Hooker. As Hooker is to some degree the product of the line of thought Perkins initiated, Cotton is more of a return to the early preparation ideas of Calvin. of course, Cotton was a Puritan and developed preparation further than Calvin’s very elementary ideas. Still, he, like Calvin, puts the highest emphasis on the law’s role of humbling the sinner to the ground.[16]
It is incorrect to interpret this emphasis as a denial of classical preparationism. Throughout the Antinomian controversy, Cotton continued rather “matter-of-factly to discuss preparatory stages necessary before union with Christ.”[17] Still his emphasis had made Cotton an object of suspicion among other divines almost as soon as he arrived in the New World. The Antinomian Controversy allowed them an opportunity to question many of Cotton’s particular teachings, as well as the clearly erroneous opinions of Mrs. Hutchinson.
On one point, Cotton was clearly different from Hooker. Cotton taught that union with Christ preceded all saving preparations. Hooker, as we have shown, taught that saving preparations precede faith and union with Christ. (Cotton’s view was that union with Christ preceded faith; Hooker’s was that faith preceded that union[18]). Cotton, in his Covenant of Grace, clearly expresses his difference with Hooker, “Reserving due honor to such gracious and precious saints as may be otherwise minded I confess I do not discern that the Lord worketh and giveth any saving preparations in the heart, till he gives union with Christ ….”[19] After the Antinornian Controversy, a Boston Conference was held to determine once and for all Cotton’s orthodoxy. The very first question inquired whether there were any “gracious conditions or qualifications in the Soule before faith …” To this Cotton replied, “there be no gracious conditions wrought in us before wee receive union with Jesus Christ.”[20] The rest of his answer makes it clear that “gracious” means truly good actions, not common grace actions. Thus Cotton, consistently to the end, rejected Hooker’s “saving preparation” view.
One of the things that was clearly established through the Antinomian Controversy was that preparation for regeneration was clearly a part of New England theology. As eminent a divine as John Cotton had been placed under considerable suspicion when he was seen by many to question its validity. When the crisis was over, Cotton had shown he did not deny preparation though he denied Hooker’s unique saving preparation view. From that point on there was clear unanimity among the New England divines on the necessity of preparation though diversity in the forms it was seen to take.
For the sake of this study, it is sufficient to acknowledge that this unanimity remained basically unchanged until Edwards’ day. Such monumental change as the adoption of the Half-Way Covenant (i.e., allowing children of baptized but non-communicant members of the church to receive infant baptism) by the Synod of 1662, had minimal effect on the doctrine of preparation. Though the doctrine’s root was probably closely connected with the covenantal view of baptism, it had developed independently in New England far enough that the pastors would have stressed preparation for regeneration as much for a baptized as for an unbaptized generation.
Solomon Stoddard, Edwards’ grandfather, took the Half-Way Covenant a step further, which clearly had implications for the doctrine of preparation. Stoddard taught that baptized members of sufficient age to discern Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper and not living scandalously, may, in fact should, participate in the communion even if they knew they were unregenerate.[21] Stoddard thus saw the Lord’s Supper as another of the means of grace which a member of the external covenant should make use of in preparing for salvation. He maintained the classical Puritan balance now applied to the eucharist: stressing that seeking did not guarantee that God would grant grace, but failing to make use of the opportunity greatly increased one’s chance of damnation: “God’s blessing is to be expected in God’s way: if men act according to their own humorous and phansies and don’t keep in a way of Obedience, it is presumption to expect God’s blessing … but when they are admitted to the Lord’s Supper that God would have to be admitted, there is ground to hope that he will make it profitable.”[22] However, Stoddard’s consistent balance between man’s efforts and God’s grace are not always clearly maintained. He discusses how absurd it appears to him to prevent visible saints from taking communion. “It is unreasonable to believe men to be visible saints from their infancy till they are fourty or fifty years of Age, and yet not capable of coming to the Lord’s Supper, for want of the Exercize of Faith, they are not to be denied because of the weakness of Grace, they that have the least Grace need to be Nourished and Cherished.”[23] This implies that visible saints are the beneficiaries of at least weak grace. Thus this weak grace will necessarily flourish to salvation, and we have a case of preparation for glorification. But this is hard to reconcile with the quotation in which Calvinist Stoddard states that there is merely “ground to hope” if the person is truly seeking. If the seeds of grace are already present, there must be more than mere hope.
It seems that the only possible reconciliation returns one again to the relation of baptism and preparation. Stoddard’s view of the Lord’s Supper as a “converting ordinance” probably was combined with a return to a heavy emphasis on baptism’s role in conversion. Like the continentals Stoddard believed covenant children should be considered regenerate until proven otherwise. Thus his optimism concerning grace is a return to Calvin and Bullinger and like them he did not literally believe that all the children were possessors of saving grace. It seems this optimistic view of Stoddard’s clearly affected his position on the sacraments, for though he believed even “visible saints” who knew they were unregenerate[24] should take communion, the line of thought which he took to that extreme was probably connected with his feeling that many who should be admitted to the Table as regenerate until proven otherwise were being banned.
To set the stage for Edwards, it is helpful to consider one last Puritan, Cotton Mather. Mather clearly would have less direct effect on Edwards than Stoddard, but his view of preparation shows tendencies in New England which are important background to Edwards’ teaching. Mather had an aversion to much of the language of preparationism[25] and personally considered preparation almost entirely as a state of humiliation before one’s Maker.[26] He was distrustful of too much emphasis on man’s actions. He repeatedly emphasized that it is better to view one’s self “as a ‘perishing’ sinner than as a prepared one.”[27]
Cotton Mather was himself such an activistic preacher of reform, it is clear that he would not have reservations about preparation because of false dichotomies between man’s actions and God’s sovereignty. It seemed to Mather that many in New England were complacently satisfied that they were ‘prepared’ sinners. They had done their part, now God should do his. Mather naturally condemned this perversion of preparation from the depth of his soul. These sinners had not even started to exercise their natural capacities to seek salvation. All preparationists spoke of humiliation as an essential step. Any truly humble sinner would see himself as perishing even if prepared. For one thing, he will never have done all in his power to prepare until he has breathed his last breath. Even if he had used his natural capacities to their maximum, a humble sinner would realize that he had done nothing worthy of grace. Mather saw that the cancer of spiritual complacency had spread even to preparation. Indeed, Stoddard’s view must have inadvertently aided this degeneration. Now the prepared sinner could take part in all the privileges of external church membership. A Great Awakening would require a return to the emphasis on the perishing sinner in preparation.
We come now to Edwardsean preparation. First, we will face the apparent Calvinistic obstacles to the very idea of preparation. After showing how Edwards surmounted these difficulties, his own rationale and methodology for preparation will be presented. The essay then briefly surveys the fate of preparationism in Edwards’ own school and other developments of the nineteenth century. We conclude with preparationism in the context of twentieth century Calvinism.
I. Calvinistic Difficulties wth Preparation
Of all forms of Christian theology the one that seems most incompatible with preparationism is surely Calvinism. At least three fundamental motifs in that system appear to militate against any conception whatsoever that has any thing to do with preparation. First, predestination has to do with God; “means” have to do with men, and seemingly they are mutually exclusive ways of salvation. Second, how can an absolute moral bondage to sin, such as Calvinism teaches, conceivably combine with faith as the indispensable way of salvation? In any case, third, justification by faith alone must make the necessity of good works sheer heresy, it would seem. Yet all of these are with equal vigor maintained in Edwardsean Calvinism.
1. Predestination and the Use of Means
It is easy to see how the lightning-bolt or holy—rape-of -the -soul view of Calvinism has been so common. Indubitably, Calvinism has taught absolute fore-ordination. Everything-human actions included—come about in accord—in perfect accord—with the eternal decree of God. Nothing—evil not excluded—happens which God has not determined in advance -eternally in advance. There is no possibility whatever or ever that something should occur which he does not foresee. He foresees so perfectly because he foreordains so infallibly. In an utterly closed universe where never a screw is loose is there elbowroom for freedom? How can a man’s action make a difference in a programmed providence? Especially, when man’s actions themselves are a part of the program? Surely, it would seem, he must simply wait until (and if) the bolt strikes or the Spirit rapes. What else can he do but do nothing? If salvation is entirely in the hands of God how can man prepare for salvation? You’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t! You’re saved if you do; you’re saved if you don’t! The one thing you can’t do is be prepared! Or so it would seem.
2. Moral Inability and Faith
Another Calvinistic hurdle for preparation is the apparent discrepancy between moral inability and faith. Preparation for salvation is preparation for faith in Christ. But how is one to prepare for something for which there can be no preparation? Moral inability teaches that man is a sinner, altogether a sinner, and nothing but a sinner. As such, he is an unbeliever, altogether an unbeliever, and nothing but an unbeliever. How does one prepare a core unbeliever for belief ? Even the Bible points out the absurdity: “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.”[28] (as Edwards, incidentally, was wont to observe). Christ himself taught that a man had to be born again before he could “enter” the Kingdom.[29] Apart from a new birth, which comes only from above, how does one prepare for faith? How does one prepare to be born again? How did one prepare to be born the first time? In the same way, presumably, he would prepare for the second birth; namely, not at all. Nicodemus’ question was pertinent (though he applied it to the physical rather than the spiritual domain): “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born ?”[30] We note that Christ, apart from showing Nicodemus that this second birth took place in the spiritual realm, gave no hint as to how he could prepare for it. The implication was that he could not, because it would happen—the second time as it did the first—to him and not by him.
Preparation for faith would certainly seem to presuppose moral ability—at least Arminian, if not Pelagian. It is no wonder that Perry Miller considered preparationism to be incipient Arminianism and concluded that thorough-going Calvinists, such as Calvin and Edwards, would not be found dead with such a doctrine.[31] Intelligent people do not drill for oil in solid rock. If you see such people drilling, you conclude that it is not solid rock, or at least that they do not think it is solid rock. They must think there is oil there somewhere. So it is not surprising to find Arminians preparing people for faith, but Calvinists? Never!
This line of thinking led W. W. Sweet, when he saw Edwards preaching for faith, to a conclusion as untenable as it was absurd: that Jonathan Edwards had become an Arminian (he calls it “impregnating his Calvinism with pietism”).[32] Miller and Sweet are at loggerheads—one insisting that Edwards remained a Calvinist and the other that he had changed to Arminianism. Why the difference between the two scholars about the same man ? Because of their tacit agreement on the proposition that bona fide Calvinists would not try to prepare sinners for faith. Miller was rightly convinced that Edwards remained a Calvinist and therefore wrongly concluded (against the evidence) that he never taught preparation. Sweet was wrongly convinced (against the evidence) that Edwards had changed to pietistic Arminianism because he, Sweet, correctly observed that Edwards preached the necessity of activity and faith. Neither scholar could live with the apparent absurdity that an impeccable Calvinist could believe in preparation for faith. So Miller denied Edwards taught preparation and Sweet denied that he remained a Calvinist. But Edwards remained a Calvinist while continuing to “prepare” sinners for faith. It remains to be shown how this Houdini of the pulpit performed the “trick.”
3. Justification by Faith and Necessary Works
If the Calvinistic problem of harmonizing predestination and freedom is difficult, and harmonizing total moral inability with total moral responsibility still more difficult, the harmonization of justification by faith only with the absolute necessity of works seems simply impossible to all non-Calvinists. Indeed the seeming incompatibility of these two doctrines is what makes them non-Calvinists. To make the utterly impossible more impossible still, Calvinistic preparationists make “works” necessary even before grace comes! At least so it would seem; for if pre-paration is not before grace what is the meaning of the term? Furthermore, it is to the unregenerate especially that the necessity of preparation is preached. If men cannot do anything truly virtuous even after justification how could they be expected to do so before justification and in order to it?
Jonathan Edwards seems especially vulnerable at this point. The first Great Awakening in Northampton occurred following a series of sermons on justification by faith. It was the purity of the doctrine as preached that, according to Tracy, accounted for the revival. Edwards showed, he said, that “God has not appointed anything for men to do before coming to Christ by faith …”[33] It must have been the purity of the doctrine that opened the door for men to come pressing in, for there was no “application” in the original sermons any more than in the edited printed form of 1738. Shortly after, came another noted revival sermon “Pressing into the Kingdom” and Edwards cried out: “It concerns everyone that would obtain the Kingdom of God to be pressing into it.”[34] In the next awakening we read in the famous sermon on Genesis 6:22 that “If we would be saved we must seek.” It is not, he preached, necessary (or even possible) to merit salvation but it is necessary (as well as possible) to prepare for it.[35]
In other words, Edwards’ revivals were built on a thoroughly gracious justification coupled with an uncompromising demand for the most strenuous seeking on the awakened sinners’ part. Strive earnestly for a free gift which no way rests on your striving. Work for something that cannot be earned. Deny yourself altogether knowing all the while that your denial will get you nowhere with an arbitrary deity who is promiscuously gracious.
In fact, strive to enter into the strait gate aware that your striving will never get you through, but, in fact, will ultimately remove you further. This would seem to make the anti-paradoxical orthodox more paradoxical than the paradox theologians.
From the time of the Reformation the Protestant doctrine of justification seemed to spell antinomianism, not preparationism. So Trent thundered: “If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by his own will, let him be anathema.”[36] So Rome argued: teach justification by faith alone and faith will be alone. The criticism was so persistent that even some Protestants (the Neonomians) were shaken and it was with them that Edwards was especially concerned. But if justification seems to threaten any works at any time how could it ever cohere with preparatory works ? Prevenient grace of any kind may be a problem for Roman Sola gratia; but, how could it even be discussed in the context of Protestant Sola fide?
II. The Edwardsean Rationale for Calvinistic Preparation
1. Resolution of the Difficulties
(1) Predestination and Preparation
Much of Edwards’ literature and preaching went to prove that predestination by God did not preclude action by men. In a sense that was the theme of his greatest work, Freedom of the Will. It was negatively oriented—that is, it was A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, which is supposed to be …” It was designed to show that the “modern prevailing” Arminian notion that predestination and freedom were mutually exclusive reduced to nonsense rather than proving the charge. However, the emphasis was not on the harmony of the two doctrines so much as it was to disprove contradiction. It was a reductio ad absurdum of the critique rather than a proving of the Calvinistic point. Edwards’ Miscellanies on the decrees and mysteries are more to that point. However, the best way to show how Edwards dealt with this problem of predestination in relation to preparation is to show how he actually related predestination to one way of preparation, specifically, prayer.
Between the two great awakenings Edwards preached a sermon on Psalm 65:2 with the theme, “That it is the character of the Most High, that he is a God who hears prayer.”[37] Without mentioning predestination or the problem of predestination and prayer he nevertheless addresses the subject and the problem and resolves it clearly:
Why doth God require prayer in order to the bestowment of mercies? It is not in order that God may be informed of our wants or desires. He is omniscient, and with respect to his knowledge unchangeable. God never gains any knowledge by information. He knows what we want, a thousand times more perfectly than we do ourselves, before we ask him. For though, speaking after the manner of men, God is sometimes represented as if he were moved and persuaded by the prayers of his people; yet it is not to be thought that God is properly moved or made willing by our prayers; for it is no more possible that there should be any new inclination or will in God, than new knowledge. The mercy of God is not moved or drawn by any thing in the creature; but the spring of God’s beneficence is within himself only; he is self moved; and whatsoever mercy he bestows, the reason and ground of it is not to be sought for in the creature, but in God’s own good pleasure. IT IS THE WILL OF GOD to bestow mercy in this way, viz. in answer to prayer, when he designs beforehand to bestow mercy, yea, when he has promised it; as Ezek. xxxvi. 36, 37: ‘1 the Lord have spoken it, and will do it. Thus saith the Lord, I will yet for this be inquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them.’ God had been pleased to bestow mercy in consequence of prayer, as though he were prevailed on by prayer. When the people of God are stirred up to prayer, it is the effect of his intention to show mercy; therefore he pours out the spirit of grace and supplication.[38]Edwards then goes on to explain why God requires prayer in order to the bestowment of mercy. He offers two reasons. For one thing, it is a sensible acknowledgment of our dependence on God and, secondly, it prepares us for the reception of the blessing. “Fervent prayer many way tends to prepare the heart ….”[39]
So we see that predestination made prayer possible, not impossible. The same, by implication, applies to all the steps to salvation. Without divine implementation nothing, including preparation, could ever take place. Of course, God’s implementation must first have been decided upon and, in his case, that meant eternally decided upon. At the same time, just as prayer, so all things come to pass because of God’s decree, not in spite of it, as the Westminster Confession had said, “without violence to the will of the creature.” Edwards was inclined to show that violence to the will of the creature would occur if God did not determine. Arminian freedom is like smoke “driven by the wind.”[40] In the Calvinistic system “God does all and man does all.” Unless God did all you could not do all. Unless God did all you could not do anything. It is all like the life we possess: it comes from God who continues-it in being from moment to moment. Yet we live our/his life. “Tis no more a contradiction, to suppose that action may be the effect of some other cause, besides the agent, or being that acts, than to suppose that life may be the effect of some other cause besides the liver, or the being that lives, in whom life is caused to be.”[41]
(2) Moral Inability and Moral Responsibility
It was by claiming moral inability that Edwards’ parishioners were most prone to excuse themselves for not being awakened, not to mention seeking. How can we be aware of spiritual realities when we cannot “see” them? How can we seek God while we are in bondage to Satan? How can we feel responsibility for preparing ourselves for salvation when we labor under total disability therefor? According to biblical and reformed doctrines, “there is none that seeketh God.” Can we be exceptions to the rule? You, Mr. Edwards, tell us we “cannot” and then you say we “must.” How can you say that we must do what you yourself say we cannot do?
It may well be that the most important general writings of Edwards on the whole theme of preparation are the four unpublished sermons on Ecclesiastes 9:10[42] the first near the beginning of his ministry and the last one for the Indians not long before he died. In a comprehensive fashion, he enumerates what the seeking sinner can and cannot do. In so explicating he spells out the Calvinistic rationale for preparation.
It is true, Edwards maintains, that fallen man suffers moral inability and there are certain things that he simply cannot do. First, (Edwards explains to the Indians in the latest preaching on this text), men cannot make satisfaction for their sins; only God can do that. Second, men cannot earn a righteousness that makes them acceptable before God; only he can provide that. Third, men cannot change their hearts which, yet, must be changed by God. This alone is enough to demonstrate that Edwards was no incipient Arminian. John Calvin never enunciated sinner’s moral inability more explicitly and lucidly. The sinner suffers total moral inability to save himself or to cooperate in his regeneration.[43]
Yet there are many things the sinner can do without new faculties or principles. If Edwards lists three things that he cannot do, we find no less than ten things he can do enumerated in the earlier sermon on our text. We will merely list them here, many of them to be developed in the methodology section of this essay:
- “A man can abstain from the outward gratifications of his lusts.”
- “A man can in many respects keep out of the way of temptation.”
- “Persons can perform outward duties of morality to wards their neighbours.”
- “Persons can search the Scripture.”
- “Persons can attend all ordinances.”
- “Persons can use their tongues to the purpose of religion.”
- “Persons have in a great measure the command of their thoughts.”
- “Persons can set apart a suitable proportion of their time for these things.”
- “Persons can improve divine assistance that is given.”
- “They can lay out their strength in these things as well as other things.”[44]
Someone may still object that if a sinner is not “willing” how can he “do” anything? Edwards does not mean that the unregenerate are unwilling but able in the same sense. They are unwilling or indisposed for virtue and consistently are unable to perform virtue. They may, however, be willing or disposed (from self-interest) to outward or apparent acts of virtue and are quite able to perform these acts.
(3) Justification by Faith and Necessary Works
Since justification by faith alone combined with necessary works is the most acute problem of all for Calvinistic preparationists, and since it was the justification series which first set men preparing for salvation in the Edwardsean revival, perhaps the best place to look for Edwards’ resolution of this difficulty would be in these sermons. We are not disappointed.
The theme of the great series is, “We are justified only by faith in Christ, and not by any manner of virtue or goodness of our own.”[46] After explaining the meaning Edwards develops four arguments in its support. First, faith and its fruits cannot deserve justification. Second, the Bible by which alone we can ever know how to be justified is “exceeding full” on the theme of absolute graciousness. Third, justification by our own virtue derogates from grace. Fourth, justification by our own virtue ascribes to man what belongs to the righteousness of Christ. It is therefore inconsistent with the imputation of his righteousness.
Edwards’ answer to a half-dozen major objections to solafideanism need not concern us here, but his delineation of the role of evangelical obedience is of the essence. This subject occupies the entire third part of the treatise, so important does Edwards consider it. He not only maintains its “congruity” with justification by faith alone but insists that it is viewed as future in the first justification. “If it were not for this, justification would have to be suspended.” A full discussion of this important teaching can only come in a full treatment of justification; but the indispensability of good works could not have been stated more strongly than in the sentence just quoted. At the same time, the non-meritorious character of “good works” (even in saints) is ever present: “obedience has no concern as excellent but only as there is a reception of Christ in it.”[47] “This is,” Edwards pointedly observes, “the reverse of the scheme of our modern divines, who hold, that faith justifies only as an act or expression of obedience, whereas, in truth, obedience has no concern in justification any other wise than as an expression of faith.”[48]
If no Edwardsean saint, however perfect, could ever think his works had any “concern” with justification surely no mere seeker, who had no virtue whatever, could think so. On the other hand, if those who were perfectly justified by faith only, had to continue in evangelical obedience if their justification would not deserve “to be suspended” surely no mere seeker could suppose he was free to dispense with what little he could do. To put it another way: if striving after perfection was the least required of the justified, how could no “works” at all be required of the unjustified?
At the same time that Edwards offers a solution to this and other problems he realizes that many prefer the pursuit of the truth to the finding of it. They would rather work on puzzles—especially theological ones—than solve them. In fact, they were in mortal fear of reaching a conclusion. For such persons Edwards had warnings rather than answers. Even momentarily to stop seeking salvation because of preoccupation with theological mysteries was a most “dangerous venture.”[49] “… if it be that you do not suffer damnation, you have a great work to do before you die.”[50]
Probably nowhere has Edwards worked out his basic theological rationale for seeking and justification more thoroughly than in the important unpublished sermon on Romans 3:11f. “All that natural men do is wrong,”[51] is the doctrine of the sermon which would seem to include any seeking in its indictment and forbid it in practice. If everything seekers do is wrong, the seeking they do is also wrong. Edwards admits it, but has at least two other observations to make: seeking is less wrong than not seeking because it is “externally right.” And, it may be made internally right, or as Edwards puts it: “Natural men may do those things that are right in this respect, viz. that they are those things that are like to issue in the good of their souls.”
First, seeking, evil as it is, is less evil than not seeking at all. For the Puritan “sin is sin” to be sure; but, not all sins are the same color. Heinousness may vary greatly as Edwards’ favorite catechism taught in answer to the question “Are all transgressions of the law equally heinous?” The answer is: “Some sins in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are more heinous in the sight of God than others.”[52] So, wicked as it is not to love God with all the heart it is manifestly more wicked still to spurn every venture God makes toward the sinner. He does not love God (who forbears to pour out his full wrath upon his rebellious child); but, for the rebel to take that divine restraint as an occasion to sin more, rather than restrain his evil deeds, is no mean aggravation. If the person has been visited by extraordinary divine favor in providence, awakening, and the like, a continued spurning aggravates the sin as obviously as turning outwardly, at least, from his gross sins would diminish their heinousness.
The other great reason for seeking that always applies to everyone is the possibility of salvation which is as certain as doing nothing is a virtual guarantee of damnation. While salvation apparently can never be guaranteed to any seeker, damnation can be guaranteed to every non-seeker. This was the basis of one of Edwards’ most interesting typological sermons. Probably the most interesting treatment of this theme is in the very early sermon on II Kings 7:3–4. Edwards shows the reasonableness of seeking without guarantee of success. The Scripture tells of the leprous beggars who sat at the gates of besieged and famine-ridden Samaria while the Syrian army was encamped nearby. The lepers were faced with the problem of going within the gates and dying of starvation or venturing into the Syrian camp whereby they would run the risk of death but also had a chance of being spared. They wisely decided to venture into the enemy camp. Finding it abandoned, they were able to take the spoils left behind. The spiritual parallel that Edwards deduces from this incident becomes the doctrine of his sermon. “A possibility of being saved is much to be preferred to a certainty of perishing.” He first indicates five ways in which there is a certainty of perishing: neglecting our souls; continuing in any way of known sin; becoming discouraged in seeking salvation; continuing to trust in our own righteousness; and quarreling with God, especially with his decrees. He next shows that there is a possibility of salvation for all except committers of the unpardonable sin, even for those who have been very great sinners and for those who are very old and still unconverted. The third part of the sermon is a consideration of the reasons of the doctrine, or why “a possibility of being saved is much to be preferred to a certainty of perishing.” First, final destruction is so dreadful that all difficulties undergone in seeking salvation are worth it on the mere chance of being successful. Any calamity whatever is worth enduring if there is the least possibility of avoiding the ultimate calamity. A thousand times more pain than is ever felt in this world is justified by the mere possibility of salvation. Second, eternal life is a thing so desirable that the least hope of obtaining it outweighs any difficulties incurred in gaining it. Even if there were no hell, it would be worth every suffering to inherit heaven.
Perhaps, then, the most fundamental moral justification for seeking is not that it is right but that it is less wrong than not seeking. In a word, it is “right” to do what is less wrong than non-doing. Obviously such seeking is no threat to forensic justification.
2. Rationale for Seeking
(1) The Divine Command
Having shown the fundamental justification for the possibility of Calvinistic preparation or seeking Edwards goes on to give arguments for exploiting the demonstrated moral possibility. He spells out the case for seeking in three fundamental arguments. First, there is the basic and always sufficient fact that God commands it. Second, there are some here-and-now advantages. Third, and most important of all there are some negative but meaningful eternal advantages. First we will consider the divine command.
God commands all men to seek their salvation and that is the end—and the beginning—of the matter. Every text of Scripture which is ever cited is relevant here. For Edwards, and his parishoners, the Bible is the Word of God. What it commands, God commands. So when the Bible says, “seek,” God says “seek.” When the Bible says, “prepare,” God says “prepare.” When the Bible says, “Strive,” God says “Strive.” Edwards believed that the Bible was an eminently rational book and therefore all its commands were reasonable. This was more certain than that men would see that the Bible is reasonable. But whether they could see the rationality of a particular doctrine or not, knowing it was in the Bible was the greatest proof possible of its rationality, for what the Bible says, God says. Therefore, whatever problems, whatever difficulties, whatever rationalizations, the unregenerate had a divine imperative—prepare![53]
(2) Guaranteed Natural Benefits
There are temporal advantages in seeking eternal salvation. These are infinitely less than eternal salvation but they are also infinitely more certain. There was a saying in Edwards’ day that being the son of a Puritan manse was worth a hundred thousand votes. Puritan training promoted virtues which the populace approved whether they practiced them or not. If that builder of the world’s best mousetrap was not a Puritan surely a Puritan in that business would build one of the best and would sell it for a fair price. Honesty paid the Puritan. Seeking for God therefore had a cash value with men and God himself tended to prosper it even temporally. “Wisdom and industry is the way for those that are mean and contemptible to come to riches and heaven.”[54] Again: “Doctrine I. That tis to the godly alone that God gives wisdom to know how to use worldly good things they possess and that he enables truly to enjoy the comforts of them. Doctrine II. God gives wicked men the travail and vexation of gathering and keeping worldly good things but tis not for their own but the godly’s benefit.”[55] So Puritan prudence tended to promote prosperity and if the Puritan, for some reason, did not have prosperity he still could enjoy what he did have. Imprudence tended to destroy prosperity and if the wicked, for some reason, had any prosperity they could not enjoy it, in any case.
The other certain natural advantage that necessarily accrues to all seekers is the reduction in everlasting punishment. This is the consideration that amazes the typical modern reader. He assumes that the fires of hell have been completely extinguished and then he encounters America’s greatest theologian discussing, with great earnestness, the possibility of the sinner who is certainly going to hell having the degree of torment reduced somewhat! This theology is mind-boggling for a world which, Edwards would say, “flatters” itself. Even present-day evangelicals, who say very little about hell in general, know nothing about the refinements of the doctrine found in the Puritans’ Bible. But back to Edwards is back to the Bible—in this case, to the words of Christ in Matthew 5:22.
“That the punishment and misery of wicked men in another world will be in proportion to the sin that they are guilty of.”[56] After indicating men are guilty of the original sin of Adam, Edwards shows how actual sins which proceed from human corruption, evil in themselves, are aggravated by various circumstances such as divine warnings. He also notes that the “mischievous nature and influence” of certain sins will add to their heinousness which will be proportionately punished in the world to come. God tells Ezekiel that if souls die and perish in sin through the prophet’s negligence, God would require their blood at his hand. “So those that by their sins are the occasion of the sins of others and of their ruin as many are of the sins of their families, of their companions, and of the places where they dwell, they are like to have the blood of men required at their hands and to have the condemnation of many heaped upon their heads.” After “improving” the theme by way of solemn warning, Edwards comes to the predicament of the uncovenanted who go on heaping up wrath in proportion to the number and heinousness of their sins: “… hence we learn that it would be better for persons to be of a moral conversation whether ever they are converted or not, or rather it will not go so ill with them. There is no good in hell there [is] nothing but misery without happiness but yet there is great difference in their misery. And though you never should go to heaven yet if you live a moral life you will surely have a less punishment.”
Then Edwards considers the “hard-hearted” who say “I shall be damned and what does it signify for me to take any care how I live …” But this “temptation” is built on a “foolish mistake” because by living a “moral life” they will escape much misery. “Tis not absolutely certain that they shall go to heaven but this is certain that they shall escape an exceeding intolerable addition to their eternal misery and indeed any degree of that misery is intolerable.” Consequently seeking all their life (though without ever arriving) would be well worthwhile because they escape “a great deal of everlasting torment and misery.” Edwards urges such seekers not to be discouraged “tho it ben’t absolutely certain but only very probable that they shall escape hell yet tis certain” they will escape much torment. If they object that they sin in the very seeking, he reminds them that it is ,’more direct and wilfull” to sin deliberately. “If you are to be beaten with ten stripes it is not at all the less worth your while to endeavour to avoid being beaten with ten more.” If you come to hell you will wish you had sought even though you had not obtained. Indeed “You would willingly give all the world for the least mitigation of your misery …” He warns the aged; he warns the leaders in sin; they “will have the hottest place in the furnace.” Those who have led others to ruin will have not only their own damnation but that of these others as well.
(3) Hope for Supernatural Benefits
The third, and by far the most important, supporting argument for seeking is the hope of success—the hope of finding what one seeks for—eternal life. Is this hope a mere possibility ? a probability? a certainty?
Twenty years ago in Steps to Salvation,[57]
I examined fifty or more sermons that dealt with this subject to see the general tenor of his (Edwards’) preaching about the outcome of seeking for salvation. To get some impression of his teaching and emphasis I checked these sermons, trying to discover whether they indicated that the outcome would be successful probably successful, or certainly successful. Of these sermons twenty-seven were clear in their answers to our question. Of these, I found that twelve taught that the sinner would probably be successful in his seeking, seven that he would possibly be successful, five that the outcome was uncertain, and three that the seeker would certainly find …In the pages that followed I showed the teaching and flavor of many preparation sermons. Since then I have examined many others from this standpoint. Of one thing about seeking in Edwards we may be absolutely certain: eternal salvation following on it (not dependent on it) is at least possible. If someone asks, “Would it not be impossible for the seeker who had committed the unpardonable sin?” The answer is “No, because the unpardonable sinner, by definition, would not be a seeker of salvation.” Where there is a life of seeking there is hope. Whoever seeks may find. This very phrasing illustrates again the liability of the term “seeking” for this Puritan doctrine. Christ’s words are burned into the memory of the Church—”Seek and ye shall find.” Of course, the Puritans consider this the true seeking [Seeking II] of the regenerate (“preparation for glorification”) and not the mere self-motivated seeking [Seeking I] of the unregenerate (“preparation for regeneration”).
If we may be sure that preparation at least possibly may issue in salvation, it is also clear that the emphasis in Edwards is that there is a high degree of probability that it will. This is poignantly stated when he is trying to persuade sinners to seek even if it does not lead to the gift of grace. As a kind of aside, he reminds them that it probably will—though they should seek, even if it does not, as we have seen in the Matthew 5:22 sermon.
We can find no unedited statement by Edwards that clearly says that any unregenerate seeker will certainly find. As a matter of fact the sermon on Jeremiah 29:13[58] raises an academic question about regenerate seekers finding. The text reads, “ye shall seek me and find me when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” Edwards’ doctrine was: “When those that have forsaken God are come to seek him so as to search for him with all their hearts, they are in the way to find him.” Edwards does not indicate whether Jeremiah was speaking of regenerate or unregenerate seekers and does not indicate whether he, Edwards, is either. It could well be regenerate seekers in both cases. The significance of this outline sermon is that Edwards defines the seeking as a perfect seeking—”with all their heart.” It is described in a characteristic and conventional manner with no bow to human imperfection. Edwards was against the doctrine of perfectionism we know. He must, therefore, believe that regenerate seekers are imperfect seekers who never do seek “with all their heart.” If that were an absolute and unqualified condition even the regenerate would not find. Yet, of course, true seekers do find as was the case with many biblical instances which were cited in this very sermon. What the sermon shows, therefore, is that even when Edwards is probably dealing with regenerate seekers, who do find, he cannot seem to say it plainly. It is not stated in the sermon or even in the doctrine which adopts the language “they are in the way to find him.” Edwards preached often about the experience of Jesus Christ-in a sense, it is the heart of his whole theology. But he does not seem willing to express it in terms of seeking: there is a certain incompleteness at this point,
So two things in the Edwardsean doctrine of seeking are certain: one, the seeker cannot be certain he will fail and, two, the seeker cannot be certain he will succeed. There is neither ground for absolute despair nor for absolute confidence. The seeker who gave up because sure of failure was foolish and the seeker who went on because sure of success was presumptuous. Neither would likely find.
But there is also a third thing that emerges clearly on the seeking horizon and that is most important. The genuine persistent seeker probably will be given grace. You ask, will he not then inevitably suppose that his seeking merits its success? No, because if he (lid that, he would not even be a seeker. But, will probability of success not spoil him ? If so, it will also spoil chances of success.
But there still remains the question about the certainty statements. Puritans have been known to guarantee success (based, of course, on sovereign divine grace), and there were a few statements in Edwards that seemed to agree. It is clear now, however, that no correct text of Edwards, properly interpreted, teaches that sublime optimism.
In any case, there can be no question that Edwards is very encouraging, as is the whole Puritan tradition. Certainty, for seekers, is always near the surface. Listen to Edwards and imagine how the desperate and frightened strivers must have grasped at his words:
- “There is great probability, you will live” (Luke 16:16)… There is good reason to think God will help you” (Matthew 11:12).
- “There is great hope that you may find it” (Matthew 2:10).
- “Likely methods in order to their salvation” (Ezekiel 33:45).
- “It is a very rare thing … that [earnest seekers] fail of salvation” (Acts 16:29).
- “Tis not absolutely certain that they shall go to heaven” (Matthew 5:22).
- “They are in the way to find him” (Jeremiah 29:13).
- “God is pleased commonly to bestow his saving grace on those …” (Romans 3:11).
- “God usually gives success to those who are diligent, and constantly and perseveringly seek conversion” (Hosea 5:12)… the more ready God is to bestow it” (Luke 11:13).
- “resolution and steadfastness in seeking … he bestows” (Genesis 32:28).
- “When persons do what they can God usually does … for them …” (Ecclesiastes 4:5).
January 12, 1723, Edwards wrote in his Diary, “I made a solemn dedication of myself to God, and wrote it down; giving up myself, and all that I had, to God; to be for the future in no respect my own—to act as one that had no right to himself in any respect.”[59] This date is considered by Simonson as the most likely one for Edwards’ conversion. But dedication and conversion are not the same thing. Though a person must dedicate himself if he is converted he may dedicate himself without being converted. According to Edwards it would seem that a refusal to give one’s self altogether proves one is not even a seeker. Puritan tests for seekers were so high that most modern “Christians” would not qualify. So Simonson’s evidence is far from conclusive. But the (late is possible if not probable, for in addition to the self-dedication this was a period of great spiritual experience and joy and is apparently so referred to in the Personal Narrative.
If January 12, 1723 was the date of Edwards’ “first conversion” then it did not apparently bring instant assurance. Some twenty years later he wrote, “it seems to me, that in some respects, I was a far better Christian, for two or three years after my first conversion, than I am now; and lived in a more constant delight and pleasure.” Yet there was progress in those years as “I have had a more full and constant sense of the absolute sovereignty of God, and a delight in that sovereignty; and have had more of a sense of the glory of Christ, as a Mediator revealed in the gospel. On one Saturday night in particular …”[60]
The same uncertainty about Edwards’ own seeking and preparation applies to his preaching to others on this subject. Many are the items in a seeking program, some positive, some negative. Indeed some are the works of God and some the works of man. We must ask if there is not a distinction (never clearly drawn) between seeking by man and preparation of the seeker’ by God. Is it even possible that we have here a difference (never drawn at all) between preparation by God and predisposition by God? (Shades of Hooker). Let us first enumerate some of the items and see later if we can find an implicit structure for them.
1. What To Do
There is hardly any duty which Edwards at one time or another has not urged the seeker to perform. We merely focus on a few of the more frequently cited and presumably more important. First we consider some positive duties and then a few of the prohibitions.
(1) Wake Up[61]
The sinner’s natural state is an otiose, sleepy, “sottishness.”[62] Hanging over a burning hell suspended by a spider’s thread held in the hands of an almighty God infinitely angry with him the sinner is totally oblivious to any danger. If anything is to be done to avoid disaster he must first be made painfully aware of his predicament. He must be “awakened.”
Usually it is God who awakens the sinner. When he did it on a grand scale in 1734, we had the first Great Awakening. The wicked are most fortunate when the angry God mercifully arouses them and they are urged to take advantage by seeking. It is a “blessed time amongst a people when it is a time of the pouring out of God’s Spirit upon them.” Thus in 1735 Edwards preached: “Tis such a time now in this town; … when conversion and salvation work is going on amongst us from Sabbath to Sabbath …”[63] If this opportune and hopeful moment for the sinner is missed, it is not likely to come again. He may never be awakened “until aroused by the flames of eternal torment.”
Some sinners oddly enough complain that God has not awakened them. It would seem that they are awakened enough to complain about not being awakened sufficiently. They blame God for it. “‘They aren’t thoroughly awakened” he says, “but they wish they were.”[64]
When the sleepy sinners are finally, fully, awakened Edwards, surprisingly, does not urge them to believe but to seek. We read, for example, in “Pressing into the Kingdom of God,” that persons who are crying “What shall I do to be saved?” are those who are awakened and seeking.[65] Again, what does Edwards tell his people when they are virtually making the cry of the Philippian jailor: “What must I do to be saved?” Paul answered “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved …” But Jonathan Edwards preached: Seek salvation. In the entire long “application” of this sermon nowhere does he appeal to the people to believe (though this may be understood). They should “seek for deliverance.”[66] This is surprising indeed. There are two possible explanations. First, Edwards tends to interpret the jailor episode differently. As the title of the sermon (“They who are in a natural condition, are in a dreadful condition”) indicates, Edwards is focusing on the terror of the jailor because of his danger and not on the way of salvation.
Second, he thinks the eighteenth century, because of the development of evil, required more seeking than the first century.
(2) Repent
If a sinner is once awakened from a non-seeking condition it is obvious his mind must be changed if he is to become an active seeker. Repentence, or radical change of mind, is required. But repentence is a saving grace and if a seeker begins with repentance, it would appear he is a finder before he is a seeker. Edwards commonly uses repentance as part of the conversion experience as we see, for example, in his Essay on Faith[67]:
The Conditions of justification are, repentance and faith; and the freedom of grace appears in the forgiving of sin upon repentance, or only for our being willing to part with it, after the same manner as the bestowment of eternal life, only for accepting of it. For to make us an offer of freedom from a thing, only for quitting of it, is equivalent to the offering the possession of a thing for the receiving of it. God makes us this offer, that if we will in our hearts quit sin, we shall be freed from it, and all the evil that belongs to it, and flows from it; which is the same thing as the offering us freedom only for accepting it. Accepting, in this case, is quitting and parting with, in our wills and inclination. So that repentance is implied in faith; it is a part of our willing reception of the salvation of Jesus Christ; though faith, with respect to sin, implies something more in it, viz. a respect to Christ, as him by whom we have deliverance. Thus by faith we destroy sin, Gal. ii. 18.However, Edwards also speaks of a non-saving preparation form of repentance. This is the Perkins-Owens view of natural repentance which, while essential to seeking, is worlds apart from the repentance that is finding. If Thomas Hooker was guilty of attributing genuine repentance to the unregenerate seeker this was certainly not Edwards’ opinion. He shares the view of a legal, non-evangelical, repentance never to be confused with the salvation experience, though, hopefully, leading toward it, if God please.
(3) Deny, Reform, Forsake
Nowhere does Edwardsean seeking appear more like modern evangelical finding than in this item. To deny, reform and forsake today is considered conclusive evidence that one is a new creature in Christ. This is taken to be a fruit of faith and not a mere possible root!
Many modern evangelicals try to avoid mention of these unpleasant items fearing it may frighten away some potential believers. If these prospects can first be won to Christ by the enticements of the Gospel, Christ himself will give them grace whereby they will be able to meet these tests (which apart from him would keep them away from him). But, for Edwards, facing these was part of “counting the cost” of discipleship—a cost that had to be paid in advance without any guarantee that the person would be accepted and with the clear understanding that the payment would never be returned regardless.
This form of seeking requires denying everything and everybody. There are a “great many difficulties in the way of thorough reformation.”[68] Nothing else can suffice. If the brothers of Joseph had not been willing to give up dear Benjamin, they could never have been reconciled to the Christ-type, Joseph.[69] Herod could never qualify as a seeker, however interested and concerned, because he would not part with Herodias. “Here he stuck.”[70] If the rich young ruler of the gospels had been willing to part with his fortune—or even half of it, Edwards speculated—he might not have found the eternal life about which he inquired but he could have become a seeker.[71] But here he stuck.
In the Acts 19:19[72] sermon Edwards tells of a remarkable reformation in Ephesus. “When the Spirit of God has been remarkably poured out on a people a thorough reformation of those things that before were amiss amongst them ought to be the effect of it.” He mentions awakening, converting, and confirming that commonly take place at such times. But the awakened are not necessarily converted, though conversion would not follow without reformation. “Some men are reformed, that are not converted but none are converted but what are reformed.”
(4) Use the Means (Ordinances)
All the requirements seekers have so far been made to meet are demanding-very demanding-of them. Demanding of them, for sinners are required to do them in their own strength. Apart from Christ they can do nothing—nothing of virtue, that is. Even apart from Christ they can seek and they must. And though they do not have Christ within them, he it is who calls them and some aids are offered for the search. These are usually called means of grace or ordinances; sometimes, common grace. We will consider a few of them: The Bible, prayer, preaching, the Sabbath and, in a sense, even the Holy Spirit.
A. The Bible
This is the absolutely indispensable means of grace. In a sense all others are derived from this one and this alone can exist alone. That is, prayer, Sabbath, Lord’s Supper and even the Holy Spirit are learned only from the biblical revelation. Conceivably, however unlikely, a person may find Christ even without these other means but never without the Bible. Faith, if it comes, can come only “by hearing” the Bible message.
B. Prayer
As we shall see in a few pages, Edwards came ultimately to bar seekers froin the Lord’s Supper because it was the “children’s table” but he seems never to have felt that prayer was also an exclusive privilege of the children of God though he does admit that only the children of God do truly pray[73] and that “our prayers are loathsome till they are presented by him (Christ).”[74] Surely Edwards would not suggest that non-Christians should offer the Lord’s Prayer in some common secular assembly. This is a prayer for finders and not seekers. But some kind of prayer is a privilege of those. who cannot call God “our Father.”
What kind of prayer can these would-be murderers of God (we must not forget that Edwards’ seekers are seeking someone they hate) offer, The sinner’s heart is simply not in it. While hating God he is required to ask that he be made to love him. This is the ultimate shot-gun wedding. You ask God to change your heart from what it is when you ask him—or else. Self-interest alone could keep the sinner at this, even for the brief time of which Edwards complains. It is amazing, in a sense, that the seeker could ever pray: “Dear God, whom I hate with all my being precisely because you hate and threaten me with hell, I hate this punishment perhaps even more than I hate you. Or, maybe I should say that I love my comfort even more than I hate you. For that reason I am asking a favor of you. I want you to make me love you, whom I hate even when I ask this and even more because I have to ask this. I am being frank with you because I know it is no use to be otherwise. You know even better than I how much I hate you and that I love only myself. It is no use for me to pretend to be sincere. I most certainly do not love you and do not want to love you. I hate the thought of loving you but that is what I’m asking because I love myself. If you can answer this ‘prayer’ I guess the gift of gratitude will come with it and then I will be-able to do what I would not think of doing now—thank you for making me love you whom I hate. Amen.”
Of course, Edwards never drew up such a litany. It is the only kind he could have instituted consistent with his own Calvinistic theology. The emphasis he suggested was on the misery and desperation but he would never let the seeker forget what God, of course, never forgot that the unregenerate hated God even while he knelt abjectly and prayed most importunately. Nevertheless, Edwards does urge the mere seeker to pray and earnestly,[75] out of self-interest. It is better “to pray out of self-love than neglect prayer out of self-love.” It is better for the wicked to believe there is a God out of self-love than not to believe it or save a drowning man out of self-love than not to save him out of self-love. Edwards found a “natural” duty for men to pray.[76] It seems it may be proper to ask for a gift from God though not for communion with God.[77]
This means of grace was more of a burden for the wicked and they found it difficult to persevere in it: “Hypocrites deficient in the duty of prayer.”[78] One advantage of this way of seeking was that the seeker would not be tempted to think that there was any merit in his way of praying.
C. Preaching
Uniquely indispensable as the Word of God was, its most effectual form for the seeker was in the preaching. “The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners …”[79] Thus the Puritan “plain style”-the plain glass window preaching so that plain people could see God.
Edwards never did anything but expound and apply Scripture in his pulpit. Rarely was there any literary flourish. His scholarship did not show. Nor did he indulge any personal reflections. One would never know he was married not to mention the father of eleven children. No domestic anecdotes were ever heard in Northampton. About the only time Edwards ever resorted to the first person was when he was reminding his people that his office as minister made him the messenger of God and his Word. As such he must be heard. “God is now calling you in an extraordinary manner: and it is agreeable to the will of Christ, that I should now, in his name, call you, as one set over you, and sent to you to that end; so it is his will that you should hearken to what I say as his voice ….”[80] He justified his absence from normal pastoral visiting because of incompetence in social visiting. What he neglected there he compensated for by being ever available to seeking souls. His pastoral work was the overflow of his pulpit ministry. His preaching went on without ceasing and one understands why he could never accept Stoddard’s advice not to read his own sermons from the pulpit. Even Edwards could never have produced this volume of sermonic and other literary output if he had been required even materially to memorize it for pulpit presentation. Being confined to the manuscript even in the outline sermons which were very full he had none of the freedom of utterance displayed by others. It is no wonder that his eloquence was, as Hopkins said, dependent entirely on the moving solemnity of his written and read word. Before everything else Jonathan Edwards was a preacher and that because before every other means God was prone to use the evangelical sermon.
Nevertheless, it is not to be forgotten that preaching may be the occasion of hardening as of converting. In the words of Hooker, “When the sound of the preacher’s voice comes to the ear, and the sense of his words to the mind, then by that means the Spirit comes into the soul, either to convert thee, or to confound thee.”[81]
D. Lord’s Supper
In a sermon[82] preached probably between August of 1731 and December of the next year we hear Edwards explaining that the use of instituted ordinances is a way of seeking for grace. “… the sacraments of the New T[estament] these ought to be diligently and carefully attended by all that set themselves to seek the grace of God with such preparation as the word of God directs to.” This is all he says as if quickly dropping the subject. Was he uneasy about the “Converting Ordinances” doctrine even then? Nevertheless, on the last page of this manuscript the sermon concludes exhorting the people to wait on God in “this way” but Edwards immediately adds: “Indeed none can truly and in the sense which it is most commonly taken in the Scripture wait upon God but they that have grace and such a waiting seems to be intended chiefly in the text because it is said ‘Blessed are they that hear me…’” In spite of this and without any reason Edwards reasserts, “but yet the unregenerated are to strive to come more and more to this in their seeking grace not to depend oil their own endeavours or means they use but to be sensible that God is the sole sovereign giver of grace and that he only is able to bestow it …” Of course, this would be true of the regenerate as well. It has no particular reference to the unregenerate. Edwards may simply be overreacting to a rising concern about admitting the unregenerate to the sacraments. Even earlier, the year after Stoddard’s death, Edwards had urged his people to improve the means of grace (“word and ordinances”) if they would receive justifying faith.[83] As the first Great Awakening was beginning he was telling seekers to attend to “all” the ordinances of religion.[84]
A decade or more later he preached a sermon rare in lacking an application. In a sense it was all application, for the address on Ezekiel 44:9 was apparently the one he was permitted to make defending his departure from “converting ordinances.” Four arguments were given against this “new” doctrine which he contended was new even in New England. Without any direct reference to Stoddard, Edwards argued that from the beginning, even in Northampton, when people “owned” the covenant they did so in full faith—they were not mere “seekers.” He never uses that term and interestingly enough he never uses the ostensible concept except that “converting ordinance” implies that the sacrament was to be used for a hoped-for conversion. Edwards stresses the other aspect of the seeker—namely his unconverted and therefore hostile state. That made a profession of faith as a “visible saint” (that all agreed was understood when one was owning the covenant) utterly incongruous for a “seeker.” So Edwards’ later doctrine not only does not encourage seekers coming to this ordinance but forbids it in the strongest terms.
We need not trace here Edwards’ change of mind about “Qualifications for Communion.” Suffice it to note that apparently in the first Great Awakening Edwards was still with Stoddard. The later change on this subject which cost Edwards his pulpit did not affect his general doctrine of seeking. Those under conviction were always to use the ordinances of religion but later it would be “all” but the Lord’s Supper. This change on that ordinance which is palpably necessary for Edwardsean consistency left Edwards unconscious of the need for change on the ordinance of prayer. If prayer was meant for saints but a formal shadow of it was available to seekers why not the Lord’s Supper too? If the Lord’s Supper could not have a formal or shadow or external form how could prayer?
E. The Holy Spirit
However difficult it is to understand how Edwards could ever have included the Lord’s Supper and/or prayer among means of grace for seekers, it is even more difficult to see the Holy Spirit in this role. Of course, there is no problem with the Holy Spirit acting upon the unregenerate in distinction from acting within the saints as a principle.[85] But Edwards gives the Spirit a deeper influence. This is stated and explained this way in a Miscellany:
Preparatory work is from the Spirit of God. It is a work that properly belongs to this person of the Trinity tho there be no holiness in it and so nothing of the nature of the Holy Spirit communicated to the soul or exerted in the soul in it. As the embrio of Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary tho it had no spirit or soul and so no proper holiness of nature and nothing of the nature of the Holy Spirit in it yet was from the Spirit of God for it was a work wrought in the womb of the virgin that was preparatory or in order to an holy effect or production in her, for that was an holy thing that was born of her.[86](5) Strive
It is unfortunate that “Seekers” were not called “Strivers.” Not only would it have avoided confusion with the true biblical seekers of Jeremiah 29:13 and Matthew 7:7; not only would it not seem flatly to contradict Scripture’s “there is none that seeketh God”; not only would it never be misidentified with the radical sect of Quakers that went by that name; not only would it save the student the difficulty of grasping the notion of a seeker who is not seeking what he is seeking for; but, the very term “strive” not only suggests the tension and the struggle, not only occurs more frequently in Scripture and in Puritan literature than the other term, but would avoid all these confusions from which seeking seems incapable of being extricated. “Strivers” is what the “seekers” should have been called.
This striving, together with “violence,” seems to make up the best composite figure for the man on the hard way to salvation. It is difficult—very difficult—and the determination of the soldier who will take a goal, if he dies in the attempt, is necessary. Obstinacy is of the essence of the way (Luke 18:38). The path is narrow, the gate is strait and one must press on and in. In fact, STRAIT and STRIVE are the mottos.
At the same time that striving is a very strenuous business, the striver must also strive to see that his striving is not his own striving, that is, not in his own strength.[87] He must put forth the “utmost endeavor” but not in his own strength. He must give the “greatest diligence” but not in his own strength. He must “exert the utmost” but not in his own strength. He has a “great work to do” but not in his own strength. That may have required his greatest strength—to see that what he did strenuously he did not do in his own strength.
(6) Be Universally Obedient
The trouble with Haroutunian’s very useful historical treatment of the theological development after Edwards is its title: Piety Versus Moralism.[88] It is true that the essential piety of the Puritan was against the mere “moralism” of the contemporary and later liberal. But that title gives the unsophisticated modern reader the impression that Puritan religion was somehow against morality. Puritans were far more for morality than “moralism” ever was. “Universal obedience” was its byward. “Outward” morality had to be well-nigh perfect before a person could be considered a seeker for the grace which alone could produce true morality. For the Puritan, a person had to exceed the morality of those who hoped to save themselves by morality before they could qualify as “seekers”!
Virtually all we have so far said about seeking concerned morality in one aspect or another. Time and again seekers never became finders because they balked at moral conformity somewhere. They would give up some vices but not others; outwardly exhibit some virtues while rejecting others. But whatever tempting sin of commission or omission, their dear “Benjamin” had to be yielded in the pursuit of virtue. “Not thorough” was a common weakness[89] (Romans 11:7). So whatever piety is against, it is not against morality.
(7) Do All You Can
The insistence of Edwards that the seeker should do all that he could may be the best place to consider how the seeker could be conceived capable of doing anything at all. According to the Ecclesiastes 9:10 (2) sermon, “Persons ought to do what they can for their salvation.”[90] Edwards preaches this in answer to an objection he had heard more than once that since the unregenerate were slaves of Satan and all they did was sinful, how then could they possibly seek? Edwards’ careful answer begins, first, by observing that slavery to the devil does not mean that he can “force” men to gratify their lusts or prevent them from denying them. “Sin has not its dominion that way but by the influence it has directly on the will itself.” It has “possession of the heart.” The second thing that slavery to sin cannot do is prevent the sinner from avoiding “particular outward acts or ways of sin.” “He can’t avoid sins of heart such as enmity against God and unbelief, pride, carnality which are the great principles of all sin Nor can he avoid “sin in the general in his outward behavior because there is sin in everything that a man does.” However, he can avoid outward acts of sin, such as drunkenness and fornication, for example. Third, slavery to sin cannot make a man sin against his will, though he may choose against conscience and reason.[91]
Coupling the moral ability of the morally indisposed with the invitation of God, Edwards can argue: “So there is no want either of sufficiency in God or capacity in the sinner …”[92] (‘It is true” he continues, “persons never will be engaged in this business unless it be by God’s influence but God influences persons by means.” He concludes that these reflections should get men moving again. The “Puritan Sage” notes that their “disposition does not hinder men being able to take pains, though it hinders their being willing.”[93]
(8) Hope
Hope in seeking is not especially stressed but it must be assumed. If anyone was exhorted to seek or anyone sought there had to be some hope in so doing. At least, hope for something if not for the thing sought. If we are “saved by hope” we would also seek by hope. We have already discussed the possible and probable outcome of seeking which showed that Edwards gave a basis for more than hope—even confidence—about certain benefits and hope for all things. Thus as we have shown above, whether certain or uncertain, the awakened would necessarily seek hopefully.
(9) Humble Yourself
To all intents and purposes this is the preparation for salvation. “The heart of man is not prepared to receive the mercy of God in Christ, … tit he is sensible of his own demerit.”[94] “If men would obtain mercy of God they must mourn for sin.”[95] All of the awakened sinner’s seeking ultimately leads him to realize not only that he cannot find but that he cannot, in the true sense, even seek. One could say that seeking is in order to non-seeking. The end of seeking is not seeking. Striving has reached its goal when the agonizer stops striving. “Come unto me, all ye that tabour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” One labors in order to learn the futility of all labor as he finds rest in Christ. But if one does not seek he never realizes non-seeking; if he does not strive he never finds rest in non-striving.
In sight of the goal Edwards wrestles with the whole problem again. “One might as strongly argue” he argues, “the necessity of a distinct preparatory work of mortification of sin to go before a work of conversion or sanctification of the nature as for the necessity of a person’s being brought off from their own righteousness by a distinct preceding work of humiliation but yet no sound divine will say that sin is mortified … before grace is infused. The truth is that the case is the same with regard to the objects of his lust and a man’s own righteousness. There is a legal work commonly preparing the way for a man’s being weaned from each. A legal conviction to beat and force him from his own righteousness and his legal repentance to beat him off from the object of his lust but the heart is not truly weaned from either tit grace is infused.”[96] Thus Edwards is preserving the distinction between legal and evangelical humiliation.
It is in a sermon that Edwards goes more thoroughly into this question.[97] How may a proud, natural man suffer humiliation without evangelical humiliation? It takes Edwards’ most critical faculties to extricate himself from a seemingly insuperable difficulty. He faces the inquiry how a sinner is convinced of his desert of God’s wrath, noting in passing that a natural man may have a “like sense” though not the same because he has no sense of the “excellency” of God. Yet he is “convinced” and Edwards explains how. The Holy Spirit assists “natural conscience” which gives a sense of right and wrong, and their relation to retribution in the light of reason and especially “God’s awful and terrible greatness.” The Word of God also convinces man of his helplessness. So Edwards would account naturally for an experience that appeared superficially, at least, tantamount to evangelical repentance.
One may not say, therefore, that humiliation is unique among preparatory experiences.[98] Like all the others it is the seeker’s counterpart of the genuine evangelical experience. It seems to be unique because that of which it is the counterpart (or counterfeit) is itself the very ingredient of saving faith.
2. What Not To Do
Wtih all the different ways of seeking-and we have only described a few—one would suppose that the seeking sinner would be too busy doing to have time to worry about what he ought not to do. Nevertheless, Edwards is almost as urgent and insistent about the negations as the directions. What not to do—if it did not overshadow the positive obligations—was not slighted. “Great care necessary, lest we live in some way of sin.”[99] If proper seeking was so likely to be successful, then it followed that the greatest peril to the sinner was in not seeking or seeking in the wrong way.
(1) Do Not Procrastinate
Time was the Puritan’s most precious possession. Not only are the diaries and sermons full of this theme and the danger of losing this most valued fortune, but even formal theological texts such as those of William Ames could devote a whole section to “De Procrastinatione.”
Time was also Jonathan Edwards’ most precious possession. While still a teenager he had resolved: “Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.”[100] As a mature preacher his “Redeeming the Time” was no New Year’s Day sermon. For him, as for all Puritans, every day may be the last day and be told his parishioners that when they came to die they should have nothing left to do but die. It is interesting that Edwards’ own death was utterly unexpected leaving him little time to do anything but die.
Consequently, because time was as uncertain as it was precious, procrastination if not the worst of all sins was the most foolish and could well become the most fatal. “The Sin and Folly of depending on Future Time” brings this out poignantly.[101]
(2) Do Not Take the Wrong Way[102]
That seeker who did not put off til the uncertain tomorrow what he could do today, could nonetheless do it the wrong way or take the wrong path. If he did nothing, he would surely perish but he could perish doing something the wrong way. There are, preached Edwards, a thousand wrong ways but only one right one. Many are the crooked lines but only one straight one. “There is but one way to heaven and all the rest are ways to hell.”[103] Striving way always associated with straitness. “Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” One had to strive not only in the way but to stay in the way. If Satan could not keep the sinner asleep, his next effort would be to encourage him zealously to go off on his own. He is the father of the theory that zeal or “sincerity” alone matters. The Puritan was not a sentimentalist. A wrong way was a fatal way and no amount of commitment to it or labor in It would make it end up anywhere but the wrong place. All Edwards’ emphasis on orthodoxy—right thinking—cannot be forgotten. While a man could know the truth and perish with it, without the truth he was certainly going to perish. “The true excellency of a Gospel minister” was to be like John the Baptist who “was a burning and a shining light” full of fire and truth (zeal and knowledge).[104]
As Calvin said, most people want to be saved in a crowd but the Calvinistic Puritans warned that the “broad road,” where many entered, led only to destruction. Bunyan has burned into the minds of millions how fatal the stay at Vanity Fair.
(3) Do Not Become Self-Righteous
Edwards’ sermons are never more interesting than when dealing with “objections.” And no “objection” was more interesting than that raised by those who were putting off seeking because it might produce a spirit of self -righteousness in them. The self -righteous avoiding seeking for fear it would develop self-righteousness! If Edwards was amused, he treated the objection with utter seriousness. With analysis worthy of The Freedom of the Will he put the fears of these procrastinators to rest:
It is therefore quite a wrong notion that some entertain, that the more they do, the more they shall depend on it. Whereas the reverse is true; the more they do, or the more thorough they are in seeking, the less will they be likely to rest in their doings, and the sooner will they see the vanity of all that they do. So that persons will exceedingly miss it, if ever they neglect to do any duty either to God or man, whether it be any duty of religion, justice, or charity, under a notion of its exposing them to trust in their own righteousness. It is very true, that it is a common thing for persons, when they earnestly seek salvation, to trust in the pains that they take: but yet commonly those that go on in a more slight way, trust a great deal more securely to their dull services, than he that is pressing into the kingdom of God does to his earnestness. Men’s slackness in religion, and their trust in their own righteousness, strengthen and establish one another. Their trust in what they have done, and what they now do, settles them in a slothful rest and ease and hinders their being sensible of their need of rousing up themselves and pressing forward.[105]However sound the theory that true seeking tended to bring humility and humiliation rather than pride and self-righteousness many actual sinners did develop their self -righteousness; and, righteous indignation on top of it. Again Edwards may not have been amused but apart from the tragedy of the situation, the twentieth century man can hardly read these remarks without some grim entertainment: Edwards after reminding these complaining seekers that their seeking itself was sinful activity only less bad than non-seeking, wonders if a thousand dead bodies is better than one.[106] If seeking is bad, a long time in it deserves no more than a little. Indeed, God has more reason to be angry with the many than with the few, considering their nature. “It is a gross mistake of some natural men, that think when they read and pray they don’t add to their sins …”[107] All the time they think they are meriting favor “they are meriting his hatred and fury …”[108] This seems to have been true even of the Edwardsean seeker. The more he “sought” the more he sinned and yet the more he thought himself virtuous. Nevertheless, as we have seen above, had he not sought at all, he would have grown even faster in self -righteousness. It was in spite of wrong seeking and not because of true seeking but there can be no denying that many insisted on earning rather than receiving salvation though the seeking was ostensibly for a gift and not a reward. You should have been “ashamed”[109] rather than vainglorious thundered Jonathan Edwards to the God-seekers who turned out to be self-seekers. All the while they sought with their hearts alienated and worshiping at their own shrine, they thought they deserved something of the God whom they hated all along. Would a wife, he asked, who was kind toward her husband in order to cover her adultery, be deserving his praise?
(4) Do Not Cease Seeking Even When You Have Found
Finally, the seeker’s gravest danger of all. The danger of losing even as he finds. just as the long-sought gift finally becomes his it slips from his grasp never again to be found and probably even to be sought after. Of course, this is not quite accurate -not quite the way it happens. Far too often Edwards preached and defended the perseverance of the saints to suppose that the seeker who really found could ever lose again. “If you have it, you can’t lose it; if you lose it, you never had it.”
What did happen was that many who felt themselves converted ceased thereupon to continue seeking. Why not? They had sought. They had found. Why keep looking for what they had found?
As usual, Edwards is equal to the apparently impossible. He gives a devastating reply to a seemingly unanswerable objection. In fact, he gives several answers to the unanswerable, “Why continue seeking when I have found?” First, though one had found justification, he would have to press on to sanctification. If he did not seek sanctification, this would prove that he had not found justification. Second, the very nature of sanctification required the same seeking process for life. Third, every true Christian, such as Paul, is shown by Scripture to be a life-long seeker who was constantly proving how much was still to be found.
First, though the seeker had, by the grace of God, found justification, he would have to press on to sanctification. The anti-antinomianism of Edwards is well known. Faith without works is dead and the seeker who has “found” and does not persevere has not found—for he is dead while he lives. “I was alive apart from the law once but when the commandment came sin revived and I died.”[110]
Second, the very nature of sanctification required the same seeking process for life. Edwards’ view of sanctification was characteristically unique. It requires a far fuller treatment than can be offered here. What can be said is that the saint had the same flesh as the sinner. Consequently, he had to fight against it by seeking for the Lord who alone could enable the saint to overcome—just as the sinner had to seek and for the same reason. Is there no difference at all? Yes, the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in the soul of the saint and has covenanted to hear and aid him throughout life as was never promised to the unregenerate seeker. That and that only is the reason the saint will never perish.[111]
Third, every true Christian is shown by Scripture to be a lifelong seeker. A major sermon-series was devoted to the apostle Paul, seeker supreme.[112] Edwards makes this quality of seeking the first characteristic of the apostle Paul in the revival sermon preached in February, 1740, on The Character of Paul an Example to Christians (Philippians 3:17).
The Apostle did not only thus earnestly seek salvation before his conversion and hope, but afterwards. What he says in the third chapter of Philippians of his suffering the loss of all things, that he might be found in Christ, and its being the one thing that he did to seek salvation; and also what he says of his so running as not in vain, but as resolving to win the prize of salvation, and keeping tinder his body that he might not be a castaway; was long after his conversion, and after he had received his hope of his own good estate.
If being already converted excuses a man from seeking salvation any more, or makes it reasonable that he should leave off his earnest care and labour for it, certainly the apostle might have been excused, when he had not only already attained some grace, but such eminent degrees of it. To see one of the most eminent saints that ever lived if not [the] very eminentest of all so exceedingly engaged in seeking his own salvation—it ought for ever to put to shame those that are a thousand degrees below him, and are but mere infants to him, if they have any grace at all; that yet excuse themselves from using any violence after the kingdom of heaven now, because they have attained already, easing themselves of the burden of going on earnestly to seek salvation with that, that they have got through the work, they have got a hope.
The apostle, as eminent as he was, did not say within himself, “I am converted, and so am sure of salvation. Christ has promised it me; What need I care any further about obtaining salvation ? Yea, I am not only converted, but I have obtained great degrees of grace …” The apostle knew that though he was converted, yet there remained a great work that he must do, in order to his salvation. There was a narrow way to eternal glory, that he must pass through and never could come to the crown of glory in any other way He knew that it was absolutely necessary for him earnestly to seek salvation still; he knew there was no going to heave~ in a lazy way.
And therefore he did not seek salvation the less earnestly, for his having hope and assurance, but a great deal more. We nowhere read so much of his earnestness and violence for the kingdom of heaven before he was converted as we do afterwards ….
Most certainly if the apostle was in the right way of acting, we in this place are generally in the wrong. For nothing is more apparent than that tis not thus with the generality of professors here but that tis a common thing after they think they are safe, to be abundantly less diligent and earnest in religion than before.”We have merely sketched an outline of some more important points in Edwards’ theory of seeking and preparation. We suggest that though the distinction is not so labelled there is a difference between seeking and preparation. Although seeking in a sense is a divine preparation for grace it is more specifically involved with human activity than divine stimulation. Preparation, on the other hand, while it pertains to the man who is prepared is primarily a divine product. Thus we could think of awakening as steps in seeking and consider the ultimate humbling and humiliation if not mortification as the point at which seeking becomes preparation.
Edwards without budging an inch from a most thorough predestinarianism has put an utter premium on the utmost activity of the most depraved sons of Adam. Without moving an inch toward Arminianism, he has demanded that fallen men take steps “toward” salvation. With as pure a form of solifideanism as any theologian has ever articulated he made the most strenuous striving indispensable to salvation.
We will now briefly note how the Edwardsean seeking and preparation fared in the generations that followed.
IV. After Edwards but not because of (in fact, in spite of) Edwards
After Edwards, Puritan, Calvinistic seeking and preparation have just about perished from the face of America. It has perished with barely a trace. In fact, less than a trace. Scholars, such as Perry Miller, cannot even find it in Edwards himself! Indeed, Miller thinks Edwards opposed it! So thoroughly have the historical tables been turned that that which Jonathan Edwards most cogently defended and ardently preached and practiced he is supposed to have extirpated as an unwelcome vestige of the incipient Arminianism of covenant theology. Even modern Calvinism can hardly remember the “time when.” Nothing brings more blinking stares than to lecture to American Calvinistic groups today on seeking as the cutting edge of Calvinistic evangelism. How did the change happen?
1. The Immediate Edwardsean School
Preparation barely survived in the immediate school of Edwards himself. Not in Bellamy, Hopkins, Edwards, junior, Dwight or Emmons is the doctrine opposed. However, it seems to play an important role in none of them. It seems almost artificial in Hopkins, seemingly incompatible with Emmons’thought, like a demure, modest and inconspicuous presence in Dwight. Strange fate.
Edwards must have noticed its relative absence in Bellamy’s True Religion Delineated (1750). This work, for which Edwards wrote a preface, was generally in accord with his own teaching even on preparation. But what a difference in the lack of emphasis on any significant role that seeking could play. About the only reference we noticed in this 400-page volume comes in almost reluctantly and leaves again in a paragraph which we quote:
It is undoubtedly the Duty of poor sinners to be deeply affected with all these wonderful Methods of divine Grace, and to Strive and Labour with the greatest Painfulness and Diligence to fall in with the Design of the Gospel, to be sensible of their sinful, guilty, undone Estate, and to look to the free Grace of God thro’ Jesus Christ for Relief, and to repent and return to God thro’ him, Luk. 13:24. Strive to enter in at the strait Gate. Some are of the Opinion, that because the best Sinners can do, while Enemies to God in their Hearts, is, as to the Manner of it sinful and odious in the Eyes of the divine Holiness, that therefore their best Way is to do nothing, but to sit still and wait for the Spirit. But nothing is more contrary to Scripture or Reason. The Scripture says, Strive to enter. And Reason teaches that when the God of Heaven, the great Governour of the World, is thus coming out after guilty rebels in a Way of Mercy, it becomes them to be greatly affected thereat, and to exert all their rational powers in Opposition to their Sloth and Corruptions, labouring to be open to the Means of Conviction, avoiding every Thing that tends to promote Security, and to render ineffectual the Methods of divine Grace, and practicing every Thing that tends to farther Awakening. And O let this be remembered, that it is Sinners resisting the Methods of Grace, which causes God to give them over.[113]The duty to respond to divine overtures is maintained but without great urgency or any visible hope.
Clearly, Samuel Hopkins also continued the doctrine. “Means are necessary to be used in order to prepare persons for regeneration …. in order to persons being prepared to act properly when regenerated.”[114] Hopkins goes on to assert that by such preparation it is “merely likely that their hearts will be changed.”[115] Indeed, though there is little hope otherwise, there is hope for seekers “in proportion to their religious advantage. Together with the degrees of light and conviction of conscience … and engagedness of mind.”[116] However, the doctrine is not emphasized. One reads many pages in Hopkins where Edwards would have made many seeking references and there is not even a hint. The citations above came in answer to an objection. One has the feeling that if the objections had not been made the doctrine might not have been heard. But it was heard. And there is some explanation for the relative silence in that Bellamy and Hopkins had to ward off those who tended to downgrade the absolute uniqueness and divinity of the new birth in which man was totally passive.
But the book which still remains the most extensive study of New England theology, Foster’s Genetic History, makes the astonishing statement that Hopkins removed the preparation barrier by his doctrine that regeneration is the instantaneous work of God and that the regenerated are able to repent and believe immediately! “Thus the last strand in the old doctrine of inability was broken. Immediate repentance became the distinguishing point urged by the New England revival preaching and was the source of great effectiveness.”[117] Surely Foster knew that Edwards had taught the same instantaneous doctrine. The difference is that Edwards stressed that it was unusual for God to bestow the instantaneous regeneration without seeking. In one of his sermons, as we have seen, Edwards represents Christ as at the door of the unbeliever’s heart pleading and pleading to be admitted. just when we expect Edwards to say “Throw open the door in faith!” he cries: “Strive to enter in” (even reversing the metaphor from Christ’s entering to the sinner’s).
These are not, however, really substantial differences. Hopkins’ difference certainly cannot be described as breaking down a wall. When a man was ready to believe, Edwards urged him to do so and when a man was not ready, Hopkins advised seeking.
Essentially the same thing may be said about Hopkins’ warning of the danger in the use of means that an unregenerate becomes worse thereby. Edwards had said the same. Furthermore, both agreed that if the seeker earnestly and seriously used the means he would be “less evil” than without them or rather he would become worse less rapidly. Both agreed that probably he would be regenerated. It was a difference in the tone of voice and the way it has been heard, even by the historians.
Jonathan Edwards Jr. did not seem to stress the seeking theme. We read, for example, with expectation, his election sermon on the theme, “The necessity of the Belief of Christianity by the Citizens of the State (Connecticut) in order to our political Prosperity.”[118] A solid address, it closes conventionally by addressing each group of those present including and concluding with the citizenry not all of whom were professed Christians. How does Edwards address them? “Unless” he preached, “you are the objects of the favour of God and the heirs of eternal life, you are truly in a miserable situation. You have not only the motive of eternal happiness to choose the Lord for your God; but the motives of the peace, good order, and happiness of the people as a body politic, and the general prosperity of the state.” Hardly a warning to seek the Lord while he may be found and how to go about it. Still the motive for faith is there and perhaps young Edwards thought that if they tried to believe, they would soon come to know how strenuously they would have to seek for that gift of God.
Nathaniel Emmons, the thorough-going Hopkinsian, followed his mentor and went ahead of him in departing from the preparation doctrine That is, just as Hopkins had said less, and apparently thought less, of the doctrine than his mentor, Edwards, so Emmons did with respect to his mentor, Hopkins. For example, Emmons preached: “It will be universally allowed, that the hearts of the damned grow worse and worse under convictions.”[119] Hopkins and even Edwards had said the same; but, Edwards, especially, explained the concept of less bad about which Hopkins says less and Emmons virtually nothing. Emmons explains that fear of danger and other items in the preparation preaching program have no tendency whatever to soften the hearts of sinners but the opposite. At the same time “means” may be used with the reprobates (he grants rather emptily) because divine reprobation does not destroy their freedom to choose.[120] The doctrine of seeking is still alive but clearly dying.
The grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), interestingly enough, shows a fully developed doctrine of preparation quite like his grandfather’s. He admits that though many seek not all find—many return as the dog to his vomit. In spite of these failures, seekers usually find and Dwight comes close, as did elder Edwards, to saying that true and persistent seekers will not ultimately fail but “perhaps” is on the bottomline. So the leader of the Second Great Awakening, as the leader of the First, was a Calvinistic champion of preparation for salvation. In his protégé and successor, Nathanael Taylor, seeking went to Pelagian seed. To that we come next.
2. Taylorism: Preparation Pelagian-Style
Nathanael Taylor was the protégé of Timothy Dwight. If Dwight was something of a pure but late-flowering Edwardsean in the preparation doctrine as elsewhere, Taylor was the early winter that blasted late bloomers. But what Taylor was up to can be seen better in Charles Grandison Finney than in Taylor himself.
Finney was to Taylor what Emmons was to Hopkins—the blunt version. Hopkins and Taylor thought profoundly and wrote in the same style. But when Emmons and Finney preached some understood for the first time what Hopkins and Taylor were “driving at.”
Taylor never did, and never could, write as Finney did that conversion is “a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.” Sow the seed and you Will have the fruit. Nevertheless, Taylor laid the foundation for that characteristic Finneyan clairn, which is the exact opposite of the Edwardsean conception of “Surprising Conversions.” Finney could have written a volume of “Not-So-Surprising Conversions.”
We cannot here explain Taylor’s theology but merely indicate his positions that, in the name of Edwards, represented an about-face from Edwards. First, Taylor denied any principal corruption called original sin that inclined a person to evil necessarily. Second, he denied that motives determine choices while maintaining, in seeming fidelity to Edwards, that choices were always as the motives though not determined so. Third, therefore, men will always choose in accord with motives presented. Charles Grandison Finney is the bottom-line of that syllogism.
Preparationism has gone to seed. The delicately balanced position of Edwards is in ruins while it seems to have reached perfection. That is, he had advocated a potent view of seeking without disturbing the balance with moral inability, divine decrees, passivity in regeneration and all related Calvinist doctrines. With Finney “preparation” is a sure thing and all Calvinistic doctrines such as inability, decrees and passivity in regeneration are no more. The anxious bench and other preparatory devices come in with a vengeance. In the day of Finney’s power the people were made willing.
3. The Old Princeton School Against Preparation
As Jonathan Edwards had moved from Yale to Princeton so in subsequent history Edwardsean Calvinism moved from Yale to Princeton. At the beginning of the nineteenth century with Timothy Dwight as the President of Yale and John Witherspoon finishing his administration at Princeton University as Archibald Alexander began his at Princeton Theological Seminary all was relatively quiet on the Calvinistic front. Then came Taylor to Yale with Hodge to match at Princeton and the old battle on new terrain broke out.
The standard joke about Charles Hodge was expressed by Park: “There is no ghost which so greatly disturbs Dr. Hodge as that of Pelagius—unless it be that of Semi-Pelagius !”[121] Like many good jokes it was not funny, unless one can find Pelagianism amusing. That Taylor represented the ghost of Pelagius rather than Semi-Pelagius was easy for Hodge to show as Bennet Tyler was doing in Taylor’s own backyard. If there is no bias in fallen man toward evil, as Taylor maintained, this is Pelagian. If fallen man can turn to good or evil “at will” as Taylor maintained, this is Pelagian. If when appealing motives are presented to fallen man, he will turn as Taylor maintained, this is Pelagian.
If Hodge was the nemesis of Taylor, the “fury” which pursued Finney was B. B. Warfield. Of course, Finney had other Princeton theologians opposing him in his own lifetime and many another Calvinist as well. His definitive Princetonian opponent, however, was Warfield whose Studies in Perfectionism traced perfectionism from the Arminian root in John Wesley to its full Pelagian fruit in Charles Grandison Finney.
But what happened to preparationism at Princeton? Did the Princetonians throw out Edwards’ baby (preparation) with Finney’s wash (Pelagianism) ? Not quite, they simply put it in an. Arminian orphanage. They neither owned it nor disowned it. It became a “poor relation.” They did not know quite what to do with it so they put it up for quiet adoption. Of course, it grew up to be an Arminian and not a Calvinist. If one prays, ,goes to church, reads the Word, the assistance of the Holy Spirit will enable him to believe! This is Edwardsean seeking? No, but this is what it has become because the Princeton which gave a home for Edwards would not receive his child.
But why was Princeton so diffident toward preparationism? Why would they not adopt it? It is difficult to say but one may conjecture. First, they could not quite “see” it. It did not seem to be a kosher Calvinist baby. Wasn’t it an incipient Arminian? They don’t like to say that Edwards had a theological bastard. So the tendency is to ignore or deny this baby altogether except when forced to do so and then to keep it in the closet. We are fairly familiar with nineteenth-century Princeton literature and can find relatively little on this subject.
Second, the Princeton conception of the covenant and infant baptism tended to make seeking unnecessary for the children of the church. The same pattern which we noticed in Calvin and some other orthodox reformation theologians reappeared. Hodge illustrates this mentality perfectly.[122] Strictly speaking, there is no reformed principle ivhich teaches presumptive regeneration of the children of the elect (who, incidentally, cannot be known by church officers certainly to be elect).
Third, the Princetonian theologians tended not to be pastors but academicians. Edwards and the Edwardseans were pastors as well as academicians. As such they could not miss, ignore, or forget the problem of persons in and around the church who could not “own” the covenant. They had to do something about them—say something to them—and that spelled seeking and preparation. The Princetonians were practical men too and vitally interested in the pastorate and ecclesiastical affairs. But they were one step removed and it was one-step easier to forget the problem. And the Presbyterian pastors studied under those one-step removed from the pastorate as by contrast original New England Puritans had pastors for their professors. However it came about, the great bastion of Reformed Orthodoxy in nineteenth century America became strangers at best, enemies at worst, to preparationism.
4. The Andover Reaction Without Regaining Preparation
If Taylorism or “The New Divinity” was a reversal of Edwards in the name of Edwards the complete reaction to it and return to Edwards (without returning to preparation) was Princeton as we saw. What, on New England soil itself, was considered a reaction to Yale in favor of Edwards was Andover and its school. If Princeton can be considered a 180° turn away from Taylor and back to Edwards, Andover was a 90° turn—betwixt and between Taylor and Edwards. What complicates the narrating of this development is that Andover also claimed Edwards as a father.
One good thing about this confused situation in which conflicting theologies are claiming the same lineage is that it makes it obvious, even to casual observers, that at least two of the claimants must be false. Most observers tend to be superficial and go by the labels which groups pin on themselves even when they are utterly false. Thus, for example, probably ninety-nine percent of the literate—and illiterate—public believes that the Roman Catholic church is the catholic church because it so claims. According to the labels, Taylorism, Andoverism, and Princetonianism are truly Edwardsean though it is obvious to many, and admitted by all, that if any one is, the other two cannot be. Since they all claim the same lineage and cannot possess it the casual observer who wants to have an opinion can no longer remain casual.
We have pointed out, when we considered Taylorism and Princeton, that Taylorism is the antithesis of Edwards. Now we will try briefly to indicate that Andover is simply inconsistent and therefore represents a 90° turn; half-way back to him and then swinging away; ever halting inconsistently between two opinions.
According to Frank Hugh Foster, Andover’s greatest and most representative scholar—“a greater mind than Edwards’”—was Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900). Foster[123] devotes more space to his system of theology than to Edwards’ and we may fairly conclude that if it can be shown from Foster’s full sweep of Park’s theology that he is a hesitating Edwardsean, it will be shown there.
Foster himself at the outset of his chapter on Park remarks (concerning the permission of evil in the world) that “for both of these theologians (Taylor and Park) their disagreement was obscured by their supposed agreement with Edwards.”[124] Taylor had departed from Edwards by explaining evil’s being necessary because of the nature of free choice. A clean break with Edwards. How is it with Park? A seemingly clean break with Taylor swinging back to Edwards and his view of choice that God controls men by “persuasives” and therefore could have prevented evil from ever occurring. Yet, as Foster observes, “even here he (Park) was not abandoning Taylor. “[125] How does he avoid abandoning Taylor? By adding the “perhaps.” Perhaps God cannot prevent sin in the best possible universe. “Perhaps” it is better for the development of moral strength etc. Here is the 90° turn: all the way back to Edwards but then a hypothetical return to Taylor coming to a midway position between the two—total sovereignty, but “perhaps” total “freedom.”
The same Parksean swing back to Edwards and then away from him is evident on the most fundamental of all Edwardsean doctrines—the infallibly inspired Bible. We have shown in “Jonathan Edwards and the Bible”[126] that though no one treatise presents this inerrancy view it is assumed and argued throughout the Edwards corpus. While Parks obviously tries to be faithful to Edwards in his view of the Bible he totally abandons it. As Foster writes: Parks’ “inspiration is mostly a divine ‘superintendency’ so exercised over the writers that the Bible is perfectly according to the divine will, and thus perfect for the purpose for which it is intended. Inspiration, also, pertains to the writers of the Bible and not to their writings.”[127] That view may please Frank Hugh Foster and many Christian writers today but its inadequacy would have been anathema with Jonathan Edwards.
We need not follow all the items of Parks’ theology, many of which are very close to Edwards, but come now to regeneration and preparation. Parks “insisted that, whatever preparation for regeneration there might be and however long this might last, regeneration, as the final presentation of truth by the Holy Spirit and the consequent yielding of the soul to it in conversion, was all one indivisible and instantaneous event.”[128] Whatever the meaning of that paradoxical statement the crucial point is that Parks taught that “motives could be presented to the will in such a way that holiness would appear the greatest good and would be chosen.”[129] Foster calls this an “adhesion, real and imagined, to Edwards.”[130] We can see the “imagined” adhesion but the “real” one eludes us. We could see a real adhesion to Taylor and not imagined. Edwards no longer has to fight the Arminian Semi-Pelagius, but Pelagius himself.
Thus ends preparation in New England Theology with an “imagined adhesion” to Jonathan Edwards.
5. American Calvinism Today: Unprepared for Preparation
I think we may say without any hesitation or doubt that today one would have to seek for The Doctrine of Seeking with all the assiduity, denial and perseverance that Edwards required of the original seekers, without much hope or possibility not to mention probability of finding it in any well-known modern Calvinists. Most of them do not preach it—in fact, they do not believe it—indeed, they do not know what it is. If you try to tell them, they are sure that it must be an Arminian doctrine at best.
It is interesting that all of the well-known modern evangelists are Arminian at best. Graham, Roberts, Humbart, Bright, Robertson—all of them, Arminians at best. In the days of the Great Awakening consider the most famous evangelists: Freylinghuisen, Edwards, Whitfield, Terment, Davies—Calvinists all and preparationists all (more or less).
Is this the explanation ? Are Calvinists today not prepared for preparation because they are not doing the work of an evangelist? Those who are “doing” it conspicuously are Arminians who need no such doctrine. So the people who need preparation are not in the business of evangelism and those who are in the business of evangelism do not need it. If a Calvinist is going to preach for anything other than instantaneous conversion, he is going to need it. If an Arminian ever really needs preparation, he has ceased to be an Arminian. So in the present evangelistic job-market there are simply no openings for preparationists.
But is this good? I will not here prove that Arminianism is erroneous (Edwards did that definitively two and a half centuries ago) but merely assume it. Those who are, as well as those who are not, Arminians will admit that on the assumption that Arminianism is false its opposition to seeking (being true to its system) is also false. They stand or fall together. We Calvinists would grant that if Arminianism were true its opposition to preparation would also be true. Arminians should be willing to grant that if their system is false their opposition to seeking would also be false. Shall we let it rest there, for this essay?
But is it good for Calvinism that preparation has disappeared? I will not prove here that Calvinism is biblically true (Edwards did that definitively also two and a half centuries ago) but merely assume it. Is it then good for biblical Christianity, Calvinism, that we must seek for seeking today? We answer no, it is not good to have to seek for seeking for several reasons. It is not good for sinners, it is not good for the saints, and it is not good for the church in general.
First, it is not good for the sinners. I was speaking once with a Reformed pastor who thought he was opposed to preparation. Said I, “What do you say to a man under conviction?”
He replied, “I tell him to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved.” I asked: “Suppose he says, ‘but I don’t believe in Christ,’ what then? His answer was a shrug of the shoulders. He shrugged his shoulders—that was bad enough, but he also shrugged off that poor sinner. That was far worse. We Calvinists all know that though a man is regenerated instantaneously it very rarely happens when he first hears the gospel. We all know, in fact, that often a long time elaspses before instantaneous regeneration occurs—if it occurs. What is the poor wretch to do meanwhile? I say “poor wretch” advisedly because no one better qualifies for that description than the person who knows he needs conversion and does not possess it. Before conviction he is “poor” without being wretched; after conversion he knows he was and in a sense is a wretch but that he is no longer poor. But when under conviction a person knows he is a poor wretch. Does such a man ask for bread and the Calvinist preacher give him a shrug?
Surely, you are not going to say that if God elected him God will bring him in. I say surely you are not going to say that for that is the way that non-Calvinists slanderously caricature us. You surely are not trying to prove a caricature true! You know, as a Calvinist, that God foreordains means as well as ends and those means be puts in your hands. Yes, you reply, but when I have preached the gospel and pointed this poor wretch to Christ I have given him the only means by which he or anyone ever can be saved. I am not neglecting means. It is granted that Christ is the means and the only means—to salvation. But are there not means to the means? How do we know Christ except by the Word? Can you not, should you not, urge this convicted individual to continue studying the Word? Should you not say that “If ever you receive the gift of faith it will come by hearing, studying, reading”? Yes, you should warn him that a little learning of the Bible is a dangerous thing and much learning is an even more dangerous thing. Yet it is the only way to possible salvation. And however dangerous reading without faith is, not reading without faith is even more dangerous. Must you not tell the seeker: “One may, admittedly, perish with the Bible but you certainly will perish without the Bible. And suppose God does give you grace how well you may immediately forge ahead if you are prepared. All must grow in grace and knowledge. If you prepare now you will have so much knowledge, to which God would then add grace.”
But suppose the poor wretch, afraid to hope, says “Yes, but I may yet perish. I cannot be sure I will be saved.” You cannot deny this. You would be a false prophet if you did. You would be your own and not God’s messenger. It was said of the Puritans that they would not dilute the vinegar of life and you, if you be a Calvinist and true, you dare not. You cannot dilute the vinegar of eternal life—hell itself. You must admit that this convicted sinner on his knees with the Bible in his hand may perish in his sins. But by this time, if you have preached the whole counsel of God, he will know and be convicted that that is precisely what he deserves. He will give you no argument unless you offer him false assurances. And you can give him one true assurance. He will in studying the Bible be less sinful than in disdaining it and thus will not lay up wrath against the day of wrath as rapidly as he had been doing. Today that would sound gruesomely ludicrous because Calvinistic pastors are not preaching the whole counsel of God which does include the awful fact that every idle word shall be brought into judgment. That does mean an additional infinite measure of the anger of God for every sin committed.
More than this, you will be able to offer our poor wretch more than a diminution of hell, great as that is, but a real hope of heaven as well. Can anyone truly question the fact that most people who ever were saved did seek and that most of those who sought persistently and earnestly did find? More than that cannot be said; but, can less?
Is this not enough to keep a sinner studying hopefully but not presumptuously all his life? And that is without mentioning all the other ways in which he may and must seek—all of them gaining something and, often, everything.
Second, it is not good for the saints to neglect “seeking” seeking for glorification, Is it not true that many who have found Christ sadly sing:
Look how we grovel here below,
Fond of these trifling toys;
Our souls can neither fly nor go
To reach eternal joys.
In vain we tune our formal songs,
In vain we strive to rise;
Hosannas languish on our tongues,
And our devotion dies.
Does the Psalmist saint not often complain about the “drought of summer,” the “panting after the water brooks,” the “arrows” of the Almighty sticking in him? Are these not indications, ratified in the souls of each of us, that the “body of death” is still with us? “0 wretched man that I am!” It is, as Paul says, Christ who rescues us and gives us the victory. But, is it not by the means of grace: the Word, prayer, meditation, resisting temptation, doing good deeds? Therefore, we do these things not as the unregenerate seeker must do them as an act of the will against the inclination of the heart. The difference between him and us is that Christ has promised to work in us to will and to do according to his good pleasure. But we cannot wait until then. We must unfurl our sail whether the wind blows or not. Only, we know—as the unregenerate cannot—that the divine Spirit will never leave nor forsake us. So, insofar as we fail to “seek” at that moment we are not obedient to Christ. So saints are not saints when they fail to seek as sinners.
Finally, it is not good for the church in general, to neglect preparation. If it has been shown that this is the teaching of the Word of God, it cannot be good for the church to disregard it. If the church is ignorant of it, she must be ignorant of the Word of God. Where there is no vision the people perish—and surely they are perishing today almost as rapidly in the church as out of it. The church is commanded to teach whatever Christ has commanded as the condition of his being with her until the end of the age. If Edwards was right -and no one has shown him wrong—Christ not only taught the duty of striving to enter in at the strait gate but promoted it preeminently in his own ministry. Unless we are better evangelists than our Lord we will follow his example.
But to show how much wiser we are than he let me tell an experience with a group of church leaders. In a discussion I asked them what they would never say if they were trying to win a soul to Christ. They answered, to the man, “We would not preach the law and duty and giving up things.” I then turned to the encounter of the Rich Young Ruler who asked Christ what he must do to inherit eternal life and how our Lord goofed by saying: “Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother.”[131]
Let me conclude simply:
- If the church of Jesus Christ is founded on Christ as God and Savior;
- If the church’s supreme commission is to win souls and build them up in the most holy faith;
- If Christ and the Scriptures alone can tell her how to carry out her commission;
- If Christ and the Scriptures have told her and that the directions include preparing sinners and saints for salvation;
- If the church notwithstanding has grossly ignored and neglected where she has not deliberately disobeyed;
- Then the church must importunately ask God to forgive her and set about the task, in the footsteps of Christ’s greatest herald, crying:
Notes
- Sermon on Hosea 5:12, Hickman, Works, II, 836. All Edwards mss. used in this essay courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University.
- William K. B. Stoever, A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven (Middletown, CT; Wesleyan University Press, 1978), p. 196, makes a similar distinction.
- New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966 pp. 2, 41, passim.
- R. Christoffel, Zwingli on the Rise of the Reformation in Switzerland (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, MDCCLVIII), p. 244.
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol. I. Library of Christian Classics Vol. XX Translated by Ford L. Battles, (Philadelphia; Westminster Press, 1960), Bk. II, Ch. 6, p. 341.
- Ibid., II, VII, 10, p. 359.
- Pettit, op. cit., p. 36.
- Louis B. Schenck, The Presbyterian Doctrine of Children in the Covenant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 13
- Peter Y. Dejong, The Covenant in New England Theology, 1620–1847 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1945), p. 56. DeJong’s attributing this idea to classical Calvinism is not entirely reliable though largely true to the continent even today and it is clearly Dejong’s personal conviction. He notes, with disapproval, Edwards’ warning covenant children that God’s wrath is upon them and will be so in hell unless they repent, (p. 142).
- I. Schapera, ed., David Livingston’s South Africa Papers, 1849-1853 (Capetown: Van Riebeeck Society, 1974), p. 74. Still it is to be noticed that classical reformed orthodoxy did embrace the preparation doctrine. As Heppe observes: “For a considerable time of course the proposition was defended by individuals, chiefly English dogmaticians, that a real preparatio ad conversionem was possible for man. Here is Witsius …. later in place of the expression actus preparatoriis which was the earlier use, the expression exclusively employed carne to be actus praecedancus.” (Reformed Dogmatics, p. 524). Heppe continues showing that the continental orthodox were careful to note that there was no merit or tendency to conversion in the preparation. He could have observed that the “English dogmaticians” would have agreed to the man. Ames who was an Englishman having his career on the continent could write: “Ut praeparentur tamen homines ad promissiones reciplendas, legis applicatio ordinari praecedit … & humiliationem.” Medula theologica (Amsterdami apud loarmen lanssonium, 1648), p. 112.
- Pettit, op. cit., p. 77.
- Perkins, Works, I, 638–641; II, 13.
- Pettit, op. cit., p. 76.
- Thomas Hooker, The Soule’s Preparation for Christ (London: Printed for R. Davvlman, 1632), pp. 165-168.
- Robert F. Ingram, “The Saving Grace Controversy between John Cotton and Thomas Hooker” (ThM. thesis, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1978), pp. 86ff. points out in his careful dissertation that the term 11 saving preparation” is a virtual contradiction in terms. This, we grant, though what Hooker means is consistent enough with preparation and reformed theology. The whole controversy between Cotton and Hooker on this point was largely logomachy, the two great Puritans being quite Calvinistic. It reminds us, too, of the different terms that were often used: “preparation for grace,” “preparation for regeneration,” “preparation for salvation,” “preparation for sanctification.” Two of those terms are precise; two are ambiguous. “Regeneration” can only happen to an unregenerate seeker and sanctification can only happen to a regenerate seeker. But “grace” and I salvation” can be construed either way as referring, either of them, to regeneration or to sanctification. Words are our only way to understanding and, at the same time, often the greatest hindrance to achieving it.
- Pettit, op. cit., pp. 136-137.
- Stoever, op. cit., pp. 194-495.
- Ingram, op. cit., p. 85.
- John Cotton A Treatise on the Covenant of Grace (London: Printed for Peter Parker, 1671), pp. 35-36; as cited in Ingram op. cit., pp. 87-88.
- John Cotton, A Conference … Held in Boston in the Antinomian Controversy 1636–1638 A Documentary History ed. David D. Hall (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), pp. 175-176.
- Solomon Stoddard, An Appeal to the Learned (Boston: B. Green, 1709), p. 21.
- Ibid., p. 28.
- Ibid., p. 20.
- It is to be noted that, according to Edwards, the only proper use of the term “visible saint” was in reference to a person who considered himself a true believer.
- Richard Middlekauff, The Mathers. Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 234.
- Ibid., p. 236.
- Ibid., p. 234.
- Job 14:4.
- John 3:3, 5.
- John 3:4.
- “Preparation for Salvation in Seventeenth- Century New England,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943): “It was but a short step from such thinking to an open reliance upon human exertions and to a belief that conversion is worked entirely by rational argument and moral persuasion. The seeds of what Jonathan Edwards was to denounce as ‘Arminianism’ in the mid-eighteenth century were sown in New England by Hooker and Shepard, who, ironically enough, were the two most evangelical among the founders and the most opposed to seventeenth-century forms of Arminianism. The subsequent development of their doctrine is not a mere episode in the history of a technical jargon. It is nothing less than a revelation of the direction in which Puritanism was travelling, of the fashion in which the religious world of the seventeenth century was gradually transformed into the world of the eighteenth. A teleological universe, wherein men were expected to labor for the glory of God, wherein they were to seek not their own ends but solely those appointed by Him, was imperceptibly made over into a universe in which men could trust themselves even to the extent of commencing their own conversions, for the sake of their own well-being, and God could be expected to reward them with eternal life. Even while professing the most abject fealty to the Puritan Jehovah, the Puritan divines in effect dethroned Him. The fate of New England, in the original philosophy, depended upon God’s providence; the federal theology circumscribed providence by tying it to the behavior of the saints; then with the extension of the field of behavior through the elaboration of the work of preparation, the destiny of New England was taken out of the hands of God and put squarely into the keeping of the citizens. Even while invoking the concept in an effort to stem the tide of worldliness, the ministers contributed to augmenting the worldly psychology: if the natural man was now admittedly able to practice the external rules of religion without divine assistance, and if such observance would infallibly insure the prosperity of society and most probably the redemption of souls, if honesty would prove the best policy and if morality would pay dividends, then the natural man was well on his way to a freedom that would no longer need to be controlled by the strenuous ideals of supernatural sanctification and gracious enlightenment, but would find adequate regulation in the ethics of reason and the code of civic virtues.” We will show in this article that precisely what Hooker and Shepard preached (that to Miller spelled the seeds of the Arminianism which Edwards so vigorously opposed) Edwards himself also preached.
- Religion in Colonial America (N.Y. Scribners, 1942), p. 282.
- The Great Awakening (Boston: Tappan and Dennet …. 1842), p. 10. Edwards himself comments on seeking in the essay Concerning Faith: “Sinners under conviction of their guilt, are generally afraid God is so angry with them, that he never will give them faith in Christ …. Therefore, there goes with a sense of the sufficiency of Christ, a sense of God’s sovereignty with respect to mercy and judgment that be will and may have mercy in Christ, on whom he will have mercy, and leave to hardness whom he wills. This eases of that burden.” Works II, 610.
- February 1735. Hickman, Works, II, 654 ff.
- “We should be willing to engage in and go through with that which is a great undertaking in order to our salvation.” Sept. 1740 Hickman, Works, 51f.
- “Canons concerning Justification,” Canon 9 (emphasis added).
- Hickman, Works, II, 113ff. January 8, 1736.
- Hickman, Works, II, 115, 116.
- This quotation is from the manuscript. A slightly inexact printed form may be found in Hickman, Works, II, 116.
- Freedom of the Will, Part II, Section 13: “But what dignity or privilege is there, in being given up to such a wild contingence as this, to be perfectly and constantly liable to act unintelligently and unreasonably, and as much without the guidance of understanding, as if we had none, or were as destitute of perception as the smoke that is driven by the wind!”
- Freedom of the Will, Part IV, Section 2.
- The four manuscript sermons are as follows: (1) “That persons had need to make all possible haste to get that work done that trust be done and that can’t be done after death.” (Spr. 1728-Winter 1729). Sermon dates prior to 1733 courtesy of Thomas A. Schafer. “Persons ought to do what they can for their salvation” (Dec. 1733); (3) “Whatever persons look upon needful to be done for their own salvation and intend to do at all, they should do now” (Jan. 1733/4); (4) “I. What men must do whatsoever thy hand finds to do. Everything that needs to be done in order to their salvation and in order to their being prepared for death” (Stockbridge Indians and Mohawks. Dec. 1751).
- We have cited this one statement but the doctrine is everywhere in Edwards, especially in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin and the Treatise on Grace.
- Ecclesiastes 9:10 (2) “Persons ought to do what they can for their salvation.” Dec. 1733.
- Ibid. Cf. also the sermon on Romans 3:11.
- Romans 4:5. Lecture, Nov. 1734. Hickman, Works, I, 622f.
- Hickman, Works, I, 642.
- Ibid.
- Hosea 5:12, “That it is God’s manner to make men sensible of their misery and unworthiness, before he appears in his mercy and his love to them.” Fall 1730-Spring 1731. Hickman, Works, II, 830ff.
- Ibid., II, 836.
- April, 1736.
- Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 83.
- Cf. sermon on Ecclesiastes 9:10 (2), Reason 3, “Tis the command of God that we strive to enter …” Dec. 1733. In Matthew S:22 he preached that “This is one of God’s direct and absolute commands ……
- Proverbs 30:24–28 (4), Jan. 45/6.
- Ecclesiates 2:26, n.d.
- Matthew 5:22, possibly, Fall 1727.
- P. 96. Nothing written since, to my knowledge, has gone any further on this subject than Steps to Salvation or even as far. Hence I am obliged to build on my own foundation.
- April, 1742.
- Dwight, Works I, lvi.
- Op. cit., P. 19.
- Cf. Steps to Salvation, chap. V.
- Oddly enough literal sleeping was a common problem of which Edwards not infrequently complained though not so much as his father.
- Discourses on Various Important Subjects (Boston, 1738) pp. 154f.
- Romans 11:7, (1) “There are multitudes of men that seek for salvation that never obtain what they seek for.” May 1704 and August 1753.
- Hickman, Works, I, 662
- Ibid., II, 827.
- Ibid., II, 590.
- Hosea 5:15 in Hickman Works, II, 837.
- Genesis 43:3, “Tis agreed by divines in general that Joseph was a remarkable type of Christ. I would in the first place observe in many instances how Joseph’s treatment of his brethren is very parallel with Christ’s treatment of those souls that he brings home to himself …” Feb. 1741/2.
- “Pressing into the Kingdom of God.” Hickman, Works, I, 658.
- Cf. series on the Rich Young Ruler especially Mark 10:17–27 (1), “Obs. 1. That there are many persons that have a great desire to have eternal life and seek it with some earnestness that yet never obtain it.” Oct. 1743 and Spring 1757.
- April 1, 1738. Fast day.
- Hosea 7:14. Cf. Hickman, Works, II, 6, 3.
- Hebrews 9:12, “Jesus Christ is both the only price and sacrifice by which eternal redemption is obtained for the believer.” Fall 1722-Spring 1723.
- Luke 8:28, “There is no goodness in praying tho it be never so earnestly merely out of fear of misery.” May 1728-February 1729.
- Romans 5:10, “Natural men are God’s enemies.” Aug. 1736, Worcester Reprint, Works, IV, 37f.
- Romans 4:16, “That the grace of God in the new covenant eminently appears in that it proposes justification only by faith.” Winter-Summer 1730.
- Job 27:10. June, 1740. Hickman Works, II, 71ff.
- The Westminster Shorter Catechism, 1647, Question 89.
- Pressing in to the Kingdom, Hickman, Works, I, 660.
- Soules Exaltation, pp. 27, 28 in Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness, p. 68. In The Soule’s Preparation for Christ, Hooker said that the doctrine preached “is like the nailes pointed; but when it is cleare, and then particularly applied, it is like the setting on the nailes fast upon the hearts and consciences of men; And this I take to be the reason why many that have come many times to oppose the ministers of the Gospel. (London, 1632), p. 67.
- Proverbs 8:34, “That the way to obtain grace is daily to wait upon God for it in the use of the means of His appointment.”
- Romans 4:16.
- Ecclesiastes 9:10 (2).
- Matthew 25:1–12 (5), 1738. The difference between the wise and foolish virgins is the oil. (The Holy Spirit and a spiritual principle). “Tis a spiritual and abiding principle in their hearts that may be said to be a new nature in their souls consisting in the Christian spirit that they (the saints) are of.” On the other hand, “whatever profession false Christians may make or whatever affections they may have and whatever strong and confident hope they may entertain this is what they have none of.”
- M734; Cf. Steps to Salvation, pp. 40ff.
- Dwight, Works, VI, 419.
- (New York, 1932).
- Romans 11:7, “There are multitudes of men that seek for salvation that never obtain what they seek for.” May 1740.
- Dec. 1733.
- For the Indians preaching on the same text Edwards explained simply what the sinner could and could not do of moral significance.
- Luke 16:16, Hickman, Works, I, 657.
- Ibid., 657.
- Hickman Works, II, 836.
- Joel 2:12f., “If men would obtain mercy of God they must mourn for sin.” April, 1753.
- M1019.
- Hosea 5:15, “That tis God’s manner to make men sensible of their misery and unworthiness before he appears in his mercy and love to them.” Fall 1730-Spring 1731; Hickman, Works, II, 830f.
- Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 70. It is well to read Directions for Judging of Persons’ Experiences to see Edwards’ reluctance to insist even on legal humiliation. (Grosart, Selections, p. 183f.).
- Hickman, Works, IV, 502.
- Hickman, Works, I, lxii.
- Works, IV, 347ff.
- Cf. Steps to Salvation, pp. 56ff.
- Proverbs 15:24, Aug. 1744.
- Hickman, Works, II, 955ff. 105.
- Hickman, Works, I, 657.
- Romans 3:11, “All that natural men do is wrong.” April 1736.
- I Thessalonians 2:16, “When those that continue in sin have filled up the number of their sins then wrath will come upon them to the uttermost.” May, 1735.
- Luke 17:9, “That God don’t thank men for doing those things which he commands them.” Fall, 1727.
- Romans 3:11.
- Romans 7:9.
- Cf. the interesting sermon on Luke 22:32, “Those that have grace in their hearts may yet stand in great need of being converted.” Aug. 1740.
- Hickman, Works, II, 856, 857 with corrections from the manuscript. We take this long quotation because this appears to be Edwards’ fullest description of “preparation for glorification.” And, incidentally, it shows how his own people were already falling away from preparation once they thought they had found - thought they were “safe”.
- Boston, 1750, pp. 381, 382.
- A New Edition of Two Discourses Delivered by Samuel Hopkins (Boston, A.D. 1768) pp. 82, 83.
- Ibid., p. 85.
- Ibid., p. 86. Edwards Jr. makes more of seeking in Hopkins, Hickinan, Works, I, ccxxxvii.
- Genetic History, p. 184.
- (Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1794).
- Sermons on Some of the First Principles and Doctrines of True Religion (Wrentham, 1860), p. 363.
- Ibid., p. 398.
- Cited by Foster, Genetic History, p. 432.
- Cf. Systematic Theology, III, 548f.
- Genetic History, pp. 471-540.
- Ibid., p. 483.
- Ibid., p. 484.
- Tenth, An Evangelical Quarterly. Fall, 1979.
- Op. cit., p. 494.
- Ibid., p. 525.
- Ibid., p. 526.
- Ibid.
- Luke 19:20.
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