The Doctrine of Justification in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards

By Samuel T. Logan, Jr.

Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

I. Exposition of Edwards

1. Background of Edwards’s Sermons on Justification

(1) In the fall of 1734, writes Jonathan Edwards in his “Introduction” to A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, “began the great noise in this part of the country, about Arminianism, which seemed to appear with a very threatening aspect upon the interest of religion here.”[1] With masterful understatement, Edwards continues, “There were some things said publicly on that occasion, concerning justification by faith alone.”[2]

The things “said publicly” were Edwards’s own sermons on that subject, sermons consciously preached to counter the perceived Arminian threat. Was Edwards’s perception of that threat accurate? Probably so, as Ola Winslow indicates in her summary of the situation into which Edwards spoke.

The battle was already at hand. By 1734 heresy had filtered into his own parish. Men were beginning to take sides. He set himself to resist the oncoming tide. The result was a series of sermons designed to combat point by point what he believed to be the false doctrines of his theological opponents. His refutation was in Calvinistic idiom: the sovereignty of God, his inexorable justice, particularly justification by faith alone. Some of the more influential members of his congregation, particularly Israel Williams, the “monarch of Hampshire”, opposed the bringing of so controversial a theme into the pulpit. Their opposition was strongly put, but Jonathan Edwards chose to disregard their protests. His decision was the beginning of disharmony in the parish. It was also the beginning of the revival. According to his scale of values he had suffered “open abuse” in a good cause.[3]

(2) Because this series of sermons in their published form constitutes Edwards’s most careful, most thorough exposition of the doctrine of justification by faith, a firm grasp of their cause and effect elucidates their content significantly. Edwards’s own further description of the events of late 1734 thus provides helpful insight.

Although great fault was found with meddling with the controversy in the pulpit, by such a person, and at that time—and though it was ridiculed by many elsewhere—yet it proved a word spoken in season here; and was most evidently attended with a very remarkable blessing of heaven to the souls of the people in this town. They received thence a general satisfaction, with respect to the main thing in question, which they had been in trembling doubts and concern about; and their minds were engaged the more earnestly to seek that they might come to be accepted of God, and saved in the way of the gospel, which had been made evident to them to be the true and only way. And then it was, in the latter part of December, that the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully to work amongst us; and there were, very suddenly, one after another, five or six persons, who were to all appearance savingly converted, and some of them wrought upon in a very remarkable manner.[4]

In the context of Edwards’s preaching on justification, the Spirit of God worked mightily and the bulk of Narrative of Surprising Conversions describes the results of that work. Indeed, this work was the firstfruits of the Great Awakening which the Spirit brought to Northampton, to New England, and to much of America six years later.

(3) So Edwards’s remarks on the doctrine of justification by faith alone must be understood, in at least one sense, as his response to a genuine Arminian challenge. But in the shadows of the Northampton meetinghouse lurked another threat, a threat of almost exactly one hundred years duration in New England Puritanism. On October 8, 1636, John Winthrop had noted in his Journal, “One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church at Boston, a woman of ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification can help us to evidence to us our justification.”[5] The wedge that Anne Hutchinson was driving between justification and sanctification, by seeking full identification of the Spirit with the believer, threatened the Holy Commonwealth because it undermined the Puritan attempt to identify visible saints, those who would structure and operate both church and state. Thomas Shepard answered this antinomian threat in his massive and pivotal The Parable of the Ten Virgins and Mrs. Hutchinson was banished by the General Court on November 2, 1637, and was excommunicated by the Boston church on March 22, 1638.

(4) But the effects of antinomianism lingered, particularly in terms of the question of criteria for full admission to the Lord’s Supper. Relationships among ideas, beliefs, and political and sociological realities are always complex, and never more so than in seventeenth-century New England. Without seeking to unravel all these relationships, we can say that the question of the visibility of God’s saving work, the question of whether there is a reasonably discernible connection between faith and works remained a vital one throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth.

Solomon Stoddard was Edwards’s grandfather and predecessor in the Northhampton pulpit and it was very shortly after he became the pastor there in 1669 that Stoddard began to reject the notion that regenerating grace may have visible effects (cf. Stoddard’s Appeal to the Learned). Critics differ as to whether Stoddard was an “arch-Calvinist” or a “Liberal.”[6] Regardless of the label, the effect was to relax the criteria for admission to the Lord’s Supper and, more important for our purposes, to sever the visible connection between justification and sanctification in a manner similar to the proposals of Anne Hutchinson.

Stoddard’s unofficial title, the “Pope” of the Connecticut Valley, reflected the genuine reality of his overwhelming influence both on his people and on those of neighboring parishes. Thus, when Edwards arrived in 1726 to assist Stoddard, he was entering a situation where, ecclesiologically, a type of practical antinomianism predominated. Surely this judgment is open to misinterpretation and must be carefully qualified, but, in terms of the perceived relation between actual justification and visible sanctification, it remains accurate.

(5) Edwards apparently accepted and practiced “Stoddard’s way,” even after Stoddard died in 1729. But by the time he wrote A Faithful Narrative (published in 1736) Edwards gave clear evidence of moving away from Stoddard back toward what he considered standard Puritan practice. In describing the conversions and new church memberships which occurred after the justification sermons, Edwards said this:

This dispensation has also appeared very extraordinary in the numbers of those on whom we have reason to hope it has had a saving effect. We have about six hundred and twenty communicants, which include almost all our adult persons. The church was very large before; but persons never thronged into it, as they did in the late extraordinary time.—Our sacraments are eight weeks asunder, and I received into our communion about a hundred before one sacrament, fourscore of them at one time, whose appearance, when they presented themselves together to make an open explicit profession of Christianity, was very affecting to the congregation. I took in near sixty before the next sacrament day: and I had very sufficient evidence of the conversion of their souls, through divine grace, though it is not the custom here, as it is in many other churches in this country, to make a credible relation of their inward experiences the ground of admission to the Lord’s Supper.[7]

Of course, it was disagreement over precisely this issue which exacerbated the tensions between Edwards and his congregation and which contributed to his dismissal from the Northampton pulpit on June 22, 1750. That the matter of the necessary and visible relationship between justification and sanctification remained critical for Edwards is clearly manifested by the subject of his greatest work, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) and by the fact that, as John Smith points out in his introduction to the Yale edition of the Affections, the primary human influence evident in that treatise is Thomas Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins.[8]

(6) Clearly, then, when Edwards mounted his pulpit in late 1734 to address his congregation on the subject of justification by faith alone, he was doing so in the context of the perceived opposite dangers of Arminianism and antinomianism. Exactly how is a man justified? What roles do God’s sovereign grace, human faith, and evangelical obedience play in the process? In his answer to these questions, Edwards sought to walk the razor’s edge of biblical truth while avoiding the illusory appeal of both Arminianism and antinomianism.[9]

2. Justification by Faith Alone

(1) Edwards based the published form of his justification sermons on Rom 4:5, “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” The first focus of Edwards’s attention is the phrase “that justifieth the ungodly,” and the point to be made, avers Edwards with his eyes specifically on the Arminian threat, is “that God, in the act of justification, has no regard to any thing in the person justified, as godliness, or any goodness in him; but that immediately before this act, God beholds him only as an ungodly creature; so that godliness in the person to be justified is not so antecedent to his justification as to be the ground of it.”[10] In other words, it is clearly the ungodly that are justified.

Throughout this work and his other sermons of the period (such as “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence upon Him in the Whole of It,” 1731), and his other major treatises, Edwards hammers home the truths of divine sovereignty and human inability in the redemptive process (see, for example, his sermon on “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” preached in 1733).[11] These anti-Arminian themes remain constant throughout Edwards’s ministry. Perhaps none of his statements on this subject is clearer or more forthright than that which appears at the very end of his masterful treatise on the Freedom of Will (1754). There Edwards says this:

And as it has been now shown, how the doctrine of determining efficacious grace certainly follows from things proved in the foregoing discourse; hence will necessarily follow the doctrine of particular, eternal, absolute election. For if men are made true saints, no otherwise than as God makes them so, and distinguishes them from others, by his efficacious power and influence, that decides and fixes the event; and God thus makes some saints, and not others, on design or purpose and (as has been now observed) no designs of God are new; it follows, that God thus distinguished from others, all that ever become true saints, by his eternal design or decree.[12]

The operative notion in this passage is Edwards’s clear affirmation that men are made saints only as God makes them so. Surely no human deed accomplishes the justifying verdict. And Edwards continues,

…it being very evident from the scriptures, that the eternal election of saints to faith and holiness is also an election of them to eternal salvation; hence their appointment to salvation must also be absolute, and not depending on their contingent, self-determining Will. From all which it follows, that it is absolutely fixed in God’s decree, that all true saints shall persevere to actual eternal salvation.[13]

God saves from beginning to end, and there can be absolutely no question regarding Edwards’s Reformed orthodoxy on this point. He was consciously seeking to refute the Arminian misunderstanding of Scripture and he did so vigorously, consistently, but yet carefully and sensitively. The doctrine which Edwards finds in Rom 4:5 is thus summarized as follows: “That we are justified only by faith in Christ and not by any manner of virtue or goodness of our own.”[14]

(2) But Edwards even yet has not finished his repudiation of Arminian ideas. In dealing more directly and exegetically with the doctrine of Rom 4:5, Edwards focuses his attention on “the import and force of the particle ‘by’“ in the phrase “justified only by faith,” and in his suggestion for understanding this particle lies a major portion of Edwards’s contribution to these discussions.

The word “by” connotes conditionality, asserts Edwards, in such a manner that it would be proper to speak of faith as a condition of justification. But this doesn’t fully solve the problem, since, in Edwards’s reading of the biblical record, there seem to be levels of conditionality. Edwards suggests a clarification by proposing a distinction between causal conditionality and noncausal conditionality, and thus it becomes proper to speak of Edwards seeking to distinguish between that which is a cause and that which is a condition. His argument, both in the justification sermons and throughout his preaching and writing, is that Christ’s atoning work applied to the ungodly individual by the sovereign work of the Spirit in fulfillment of the electing grace of the Father is the sole cause of justification. But there are several non-causal conditions, and here it is best that Edwards speak for himself.

…by the word condition, as it is very often (and perhaps most commonly) used, we mean anything that may have the place of a condition in a conditional proposition, and as such is truly connected with the consequent, especially if the proposition holds both in the affirmative and negative, as the condition is either affirmed or denied. If it be that with which, or which being supposed, a thing shall be, and without which, or it being denied, a thing shall not be, we in such a case call it a condition of that thing…. In one sense, Christ alone performs the condition of our justification and salvation; in another sense, faith is the condition of justification; in another sense, other qualifications and acts are conditions of salvation and justification too…. There is a difference between being justified by a thing, and that thing universally, necessarily, and inseparably attending justification; for so do a great many things that we are not said to be justified by.[15]

Edwards’s distinction between cause and condition receives substantial elucidation in his treatise on Freedom of Will. There he labors at great length to define the notion of causality. The word “cause,” argues Edwards, is properly used only

to signify any antecedent, either natural or moral, positive or negative, on which an Event, either a thing, or the manner and circumstance of a thing, so depends, that it is the ground and reason, either in whole, or in part, why it is, rather than not; or why it is as it is, rather than otherwise; or, in other words, any antecedent with which a consequent Event is so connected, that it truly belongs to the reason why the proposition which affirms that Event is true; whether it has any positive influence, or not.[16]

(3) Working with this definition of causality, Edwards clearly affirms that the grace of God is the only cause of justification. He therefore intentionally chooses not to make use of the Aristotelean distinction among various types of causes, preferring to restrict the concept of causation to the sovereign workings of Almighty God. In doing this, Edwards is seeking to draw upon the full connotative force of the word “cause” and to restrict that force to the operations of God’s grace. This is precisely why he chooses not to speak in terms of different kinds of causes when discussing justification. The origin of justification is only the sovereign grace of God.

In his treatise on Freedom of Will, Edwards expands on the meaning of causality and describes in precise detail the distinction between a “means” and a “cause.”[17] Suffice it to say here that Edwards wants to maintain as clearly and strongly as possible the absolute qualitative difference between God’s action and man’s action. It is only the former which may legitimately be described as the “cause” of justification. But there are, in addition to the one cause, several conditions, with which justification shall be and without which it shall not be, and it is to these noncausal conditions that Edwards next turns in his discussion of justification.

He proceeds by distinguishing first between two different types of conditions in the justification process and he does so for clearly exegetical reasons. Rom 4:5 and a multitude of other biblical passages make it clear that the conditionality of faith is of a different order from the conditionality of anything else.[18] Faith is unique among conditions; it does what nothing else can do and Edwards moves first to consider if faith’s uniqueness lies in its instrumental character. Edwards, however, has a problem with one of the traditional ways of understanding the instrumentality of faith. Some theologians, he reasons, have argued that the relationship between faith and justification is best expressed in terms of

faith’s being the instrument of our justification; which has been misunderstood, and injuriously represented, and ridiculed by those that have denied the doctrine of justification by faith alone, as though they had supposed faith was used as an instrument in the hand of God, whereby he performed and brought to pass that act of his, viz. approving and justifying the believer. Whereas it was not intended that faith was the instrument wherewith God justifies, but the instrument wherewith we receive justification; not the instrument wherewith the justifier acts in justifying, but wherewith the receiver of justification acts in accepting justification. But yet, it must be owned, this is an obscure way of speaking, and there must certainly be some impropriety in calling it an instrument wherewith we receive or accept justification; for the very persons who thus explain the matter, speak of faith as being the reception or acceptance itself; and if so, how can it be the instrument of reception or acceptance? Certainly there is a difference between the act and the instrument. Besides, by their own descriptions of faith, Christ, the mediator by whom, and his righteousness by which, we are justified, is more directly the object of this acceptance and justification, which is the benefit arising therefrom more indirectly; and therefore, if faith be an instrument, it is more properly the instrument by which we receive Christ, than the instrument by which we receive justification.[19]

(4) The unique role of faith in the redemptive event is that it is by faith that we “close with Christ”; it is by faith that we are united to Christ, which union forms the foundation upon which God’s justifying verdict is based. Edwards’s position here is crystal clear.

It is certain that there is some union or relation that the people of Christ stand in to him, that is expressed in Scripture, from time to time, by being in Christ, and is represented frequently by those metaphors of being members of Christ, or being united to him as members to the head, and branches to the stock, and is compared to a marriage union between husband and wife…. 

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This relation or union to Christ, whereby Christians are said to be in Christ, …is the ground of their right to his benefits. This needs no proof; the reason of the thing, at first blush, demonstrates it. It is exceeding evident also by Scripture, 1 John v. 12. “He that hath the Son, hath life; and he that hath not the Son, hath not life.” 1 Cor. i. 30. “Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us—righteousness.” First we must be in him, and then he will be made righteousness or justification to us. Eph. i. 6. “Who hath made us accepted in the beloved.” Our being in him is the ground of our being accepted.[20]

Thus, by faith we receive Christ and being united to Christ, we are pronounced justified by God. Edwards summarizes:

I do not now pretend to define justifying faith, or to determine precisely how much is contained in it, but only to determine thus much concerning it, viz. That it is that by which the soul, which before was separate and alienated from Christ, unites itself to him, or ceases to be any longer in that state of alienation, and comes into that forementioned union or relation to him; or, to use the scripture phrase, it is that by which the soul comes to Christ, and receives Him.[21]

Edwards then anchors this definition into the bedrock of Scripture by relating his comments very clearly and accurately to John 6:35–44.

(5) Three points need to be made here regarding Edwards’s understanding of the critical and unique conditionality of faith in justification. In subsuming the entire salvific process under the rubric of union with Christ, Edwards establishes his position clearly in the tradition of John Calvin and John Murray.[22] It is on this precise point that Conrad Cherry effectively refutes Perry Miller’s earlier charge that Edwards’s soteriology was a mix of Newton and Locke and makes it clear that Edwards stood consciously within the parameters of Reformed orthodoxy.[23]

Secondly, while he talks of faith as that by which, on our part, we become united to Christ, Edwards maintains fervently and clearly that faith in our hearts is accomplished (“caused”) by God’s sovereign grace. Surely the passages mentioned above make it clear that Edwards was no crypto-Arminian. Time after time, in his sermons and in such treatises as Religious Affections, Freedom of Will, and Original Sin, Edwards expounds the doctrine of unregenerate inability.[24] God does not “have faith for” man but God does cause faith in man, understanding the notion of “cause” in an Edwardsean sense.

The third point is somewhat more complex and occupies Edwards’s own attention through much of his study of justification. What exactly is the relationship between our faith and our being united to Christ? And what is the relationship between our union with Christ and our justification? Does our faith cause union with Christ and does our union with Christ cause our justification? “No, on both counts,” asserts Edwards, still deeply concerned to eliminate all human merit (even divinely accomplished human merit) from possible consideration as a cause of justification. Edwards explains the connections he sees between faith and union with Christ and between union with Christ and justification in terms of what he calls “fitness.”

God does not give those that believe an union with or an interest in the Saviour as a reward for faith, but only because faith is the soul’s active uniting with Christ, or is itself the very act of unition, on their part. God sees it fit, that in order to an union being established between two intelligent active beings or persons, so as that they should be looked upon as one, there should be the mutual act of both, that each should receive other, as actively joining themselves one to another…. 

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But I humbly conceive we have been ready to look too far to find out what that influence of faith in our justification is, or what is that dependence of this effect of faith, signified by the expression of being justified by faith, overlooking that which is most obviously pointed forth in the expression, viz. that (there being a mediator that has purchased justification) faith in this mediator is that which renders it a meet and suitable thing, in the sight of God, that the believer, rather than others, should have this purchased benefit assigned to him.

Edwards then summarizes as follows:

To be justified, is to be approved of God as a proper subject of pardon, with a right to eternal life; and therefore, when it is said that we are justified by faith, what else can be understood by it, than that faith is that by which we are rendered approvable, fitly so, and indeed, as the case stands, proper subjects of this benefit? 

This is something different from faith being the condition of justification, though inseparably connected with justification. So are many other things besides faith; and yet nothing in us but faith renders it meet that we should have justification assigned to us.[25]

Edwards then offers a powerful and instructive summary of this point.

From these things we may learn in what manner faith is the only condition of justification and salvation. For though it be not the only condition, so as alone truly to have the place of a condition in an hypothetical proposition, in which justification and salvation are the consequent, yet it is the condition of justification in a manner peculiar to it, and so that nothing else has a parallel influence with it; because faith includes the whole act of unition to Christ as a Saviour. The entire active uniting of the soul, or the whole of what is called coming to Christ, and receiving of him, is called faith in Scripture; and however other things may be no less excellent than faith, yet it is not the nature of any other graces or virtues directly to close with Christ as a mediator, any further than they enter into the constitution of justifying faith, and do belong to its nature.[26]

(6) So faith does not merit union with Christ and union with Christ does not merit justification; instead, these are naturally fit or appropriate or suitable or meet relations. Edwards spends a good bit of time expounding this concept and considers it at much greater length in The Nature of True Virtue.[27] Suffice it to say here that he sees these relationships as being ontologically grounded. God so constructed reality that, in the natural order of things, union with Christ belongs with faith and justification belongs with being in Christ. And the word “order” is crucial; it is because of his “love of order” (order understood not in a Platonic sense but in the sense of an expression of God’s nature) that God justifies those who are in Christ. Thus Edwards has constructed yet another defense against the perceived threat of Arminian works righteousness, and Cherry effectively captures the result of Edwards’s exposition, “Faith is not in any sense man’s earning or meriting of salvation—even through power given him in Christ. Rather, faith is the natural —i.e., the devoid of moral worth—vinculum between man and the righteousness of Christ.”[28]

(7) Thus far, his efforts have been clearly and specifically directed against the “noise of Arminianism,” but knowing that he must also confront the spectre of antinomianism even within his own congregation, Edwards now moves decisively to “show how evangelical obedience is concerned in this affair.” Faith may appropriately be regarded as a unique condition of justification in the manner explained above, but there are other conditions (that without which justification will not be) as well, and these conditions are indeed subsumed under the notion of evangelical obedience. Edwards’s own approach to this category of second order conditionality is instructive.

…from what has been said, we may see that the Scripture doctrine of justification by faith alone, without any manner of goodness or excellency of ours, does in no wise diminish either the necessity or benefit of a sincere evangelical universal obedience. Man’s salvation is not only indissolubly connected with obedience, and damnation with the want of it, in those who have opportunity for it, but depends upon it in many respects. It is the way to salvation, and the necessary preparation for it; eternal blessings are bestowed in reward for it, and our justification in our own consciences and at the day of judgment depends on it, as the proper evidence of our acceptable state; and that even in accepting of us as entitled to life in our justification, God has respect to this, as that on which the fitness of such an act of justification depends: so that our salvation does as truly depend upon it, as if we were justified for the moral excellency of it.[29]

(8) First to be noted in this context is the strength of Edwards’s assertion, and one way to appreciate that strength is to focus on his use of the word “necessity” in describing obedience. In Freedom of Will, Edwards provides his own explication in defining necessity as

nothing else than the FULL AND FIXED CONNEXION BETWEEN THE THINGS SIGNIFIED BY THE SUBJECT AND PREDICATE OF A PROPOSITION, which affirms something to be true. When there is such a connexion, then the thing affirmed in the proposition is necessary…. When the subject and predicate of the proposition, which affirms the existence of any thing, either substance, quality, act, or circumstance, have a full and CERTAIN CONNEXION, then the existence or being of that thing is said to be necessary.[30]

To be specific, then, there is a full, fixed, and certain connection between obedience and justification.

Edwards develops this notion further in his masterpiece, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. In Part III, where Edwards describes at length the twelve signs of genuinely gracious affections, the first focus, as one should certainly expect by now from Edwards, is on the origin of such affections in the sovereign work of the Spirit.[31] But beyond that, Edwards affirms again the necessary connection between faith and works.

The tendency of grace in the heart to holy practice, is very direct, and the connexion most natural, close, and necessary. True grace is not an inactive thing; there is nothing in heaven or earth of a more active nature; for it is life itself, the most active kind, even spiritual and divine life. It is no barren thing; there is nothing in the universe that in its nature has a greater tendency to fruit. Godliness in the heart has as direct a relation to practice, as a fountain has to a stream, or as the luminous nature of the sun has to beams sent forth, or as life has to breathing, or the beating of the pulse, or any other vital act; or as a habit or principle of action has to action: for it is the very nature and notion of grace, that it is a principle of holy action or practice.[32]

(9) Edwards thus considers evangelical obedience a result (a “sign”) of the Spirit’s work and not at all a cause of that work. Along this line, he interprets James as describing “manifestative justification” and not “causal justification,” and interprets biblical promises made to obedience in the same light.[33] The fact that a certain reality is not a cause does not mean, however, that it may not be a condition. Very simply, all causes are conditions but not all conditions are causes. Evangelical obedience is thus fully a condition of justication, but clearly is not a cause of justification.

(10) What then is the precise relationship between post-justification obedience and blessing? Here Edwards returns to his understanding of “fitness.” First, he makes it clear that blessing pertains only to those who are already in Christ: “It is not meet that any thing in us should be accepted of God as any excellency of our persons, until we are actually in Christ, and justified through Him.”[34] God structured reality such that blessing belongs only to those united to Christ. But just as surely as it belongs only to them, it does belong to them—again because of the “meetness” or “fitness” of that relation.

Here, however, the fitness is more than natural; it is also fully moral as well. That is, those who stand in Christ, those who are justified will be blessed on account of and in proportion to their obedience to the Word of God.[35] Strictly speaking, even here the “cause” remains the sovereign grace of God. As Edwards points out in Freedom of Will and Religious Affections, man’s will acts in accord with its “disposition,” and a “gracious disposition” can come only from the operations of the Spirit.[36] Thus, the Holy Spirit causes an individual’s evangelical obedience, but this does not diminish the meritoriousness of that obedience one bit. As Edwards argues in one of the most powerful sections of Freedom of Will, “The essence of the virtue and vice of dispositions of the heart, and acts of the will, lies not in their cause, but their nature.”[37] Because of the nature of evangelical obedience in the life of one who already stands in Christ, reward, merit, and blessing all are appropriate and meet for that person.

Our heavenly Father may already have that favour for a child, whereby he may be thoroughly ready to give the child an inheritance, because he is his child; which he is by the purchase of Christ’s righteousness: and yet that the Father may choose to bestow the inheritance on the child in a way of reward for his dutifulness, and behaving in a manner becoming a child. And so great a reward may not be judged more than a meet reward for his dutifulness; but that so great a reward is judged meet, does not arise from the excellency of the obedience absolutely considered, but from his standing in so near and honourable a relation to God, as that of a child, which is obtained only by the righteousness of Christ. And thus the reward, and the greatness of it, arises properly from the righteousness of Christ; though it be indeed in some sort the reward of their obedience…. 

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From the value God sets upon their persons, for the sake of Christ’s worthiness, he also sets a high value on their virtue and performances. Their meek and quiet spirit is of great price in his sight. Their fruits are pleasant fruits, their offerings are an odour of sweet smell to him; and that because of the value he sets on their persons, as has been already observed and explained. This preciousness or high valuableness of believers is a moral fitness to a reward; and yet this valuableness is all in the righteousness of Christ, that is the foundation of it.[38]

(11) In his sermons on justification, Edwards seeks to answer both Arminianism and antinomianism. To the former, he affirms that God’s grace alone causes justification, that not even faith plays a causal role in the process by which an individual moves from death to life. Thus, no man may be arrogant before God; all credit, all honor, all glory must be given to the sovereign Lord who is in himself, as Edwards puts it in the Affections, the sole transcendentally excellent and amiable ground of gracious affections.

But causes are not the only conditions. Faith is the preeminent noncausal condition of justification, and, to the antinomians among his hearers, Edwards proclaims that there are other conditions also. Justification is conditioned upon obedience as well. Justification is conditioned upon obedience in the sense that with genuine evangelical obedience justification shall be and without genuine evangelical obedience justification shall not be. Thus, justification and sanctification are inseparable, a fact with challenging implications to every Christian and with helpful implications to every pastor or session who must determine whom to admit to the Lord’s Table.

(12) All of these relationships Edwards sees as controlled and explicated by the notion of “fitness.” Because our God “is a wise being, and delights in order, and not in confusion,” he so structured his creation that there exist entities and actions that belong together, that have a “natural concord” or agreeableness.[39] So do faith in Christ and union with Christ belong naturally together; faith does not cause union with Christ—the two simply belong together. To some relations, the fitness goes beyond this natural concord and includes a moral or meritorious dimension. So, obedience by one who is united to Christ (and by natural fitness is justified) appropriately merits God’s reward.

Fitness or the lack thereof remains, for Edwards, firmly grounded in God’s very nature. God’s creation of the world gave expression to his being and that determines what “fits” and what does not. So “I am” sets the parameters of what is in all of creation, including the process of justification.

Practically speaking, therefore, God alone justifies, but man must have faith and must obey. Such is Edwards’s doctrine of justification. But is it biblical?

II. Is Edwards’s Understanding of Justification by Faith Biblical?

1. The Distinction between Cause and Condition

(1) Clearly, Edwards has correctly presented the fundamental biblical teaching on justification by faith alone. The crucial Edwardsean distinction between cause and condition is there in the sense of the biblical message even if the terms themselves are not used in exactly the way Edwards employs them. The church has for many centuries asserted that though the term “Trinity” is not present in Scripture, the concept most definitely is present; the same is true in this instance.

Time after time the Scriptures witness to God the Creator and, in doing so, they affirm God’s role as source, as cause of all that is. Genesis 1 remains the foundational passage in this regard, spotlighting in bold relief the essential ontological difference between the Creator/Cause and all that is creation/caused. The ethical dimension of this ontological distinction, which is more directly relevant to our present discussion, receives similar emphasis throughout Scripture. Jesus’ words to the rich young ruler in Mark 10:18 assert that to “God alone” may the adjective “good” be appropriately applied and the implication in the light of the rest of Scripture is that God alone may cause goodness.

(2) But, of course, this is precisely what those passages teach which focus more specifically on the matter of God’s justification of the ungodly. Rom 3:21–30 and Eph 2:1–2 cannot be mistaken; the good estate of the justified rests totally on the will and work of the sovereign God. Man makes no contribution to his redemption whatsoever and it is because he doesn’t that all boasting before God is forever excluded (Rom 3:27). God’s action alone causes us to move from death to life and thus justification becomes God’s gift to us. So Edwards’s answer to the Arminians of his day correctly captures one emphasis within God’s revelation of himself and his ways.

If Romans 3 makes clear the unique causal necessity of divine action in the justifying process, so does it also assert the unique conditional necessity of faith in that process. But even more strongly do Romans 4 and 5 describe the nature of that faith which saves, the focus clearly being, as Edwards argues, on that union with Christ, that covenant solidarity with the second Adam as the ground of what God does when he pronounces us justified. Edwards makes the point explicitly, “What is real in the union between Christ and his people is the foundation of what is legal.”[40] It is “in the Beloved” that we receive his grace and “in him” that we have redemption (Eph 1:6–7) and it is “by faith” that we are in him. So then the unique conditional necessity of faith must be affirmed even as Edwards affirms it.

(3) But the book of Romans doesn’t end with the twenty-first verse of chapter five. Immediately Paul moves in chapter six to describe the manner in which evangelical obedience might also be said to be a condition of justification. And Paul’s method here bears striking resemblance to his procedure in Ephesians 2 where, after affirming clearly the necessary roles of grace and faith, he goes on to make it clear that those justified are “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph 2:10). The point is that the book of James “belongs.” It says nothing that had not characterized God’s revelation for millennia—that evangelical obedience is an absolute necessity, a “condition” in man’s justification.

Edwards’s terminology is, for example, a very helpful way to understand what the prophet is preaching in Isaiah 58.

And if you give yourself to the hungry,
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then your light will rise in darkness
and your gloom will become like midday.

And the Lord will continually guide you,
and satisfy your desire in scorched places,
and give strength to your bones;
and you will be like a watered garden,
and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. [NASB]

The covenant blessings described here clearly are conditional in the sense that with covenant obedience they shall be and without covenant obedience they shall not be. But saying this does not mean that obedience causes the blessing, as Edwards so forcefully points out. The same is true in one of the most direct NT treatments of this theme. In Matt 25:31–46, Jesus himself speaks to the point.

31 “But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne.

32 “And all the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats;

33 and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

35 ‘For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in;

36 naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You drink?

38 ‘And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You?

39 ‘And when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’

40 “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’

41 “Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;

42 for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink;

43 I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’

44 “Then they themselves also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’

45 “Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Truly I say to you, to the

WTJ 46:1 (Spr 1984) p. 45

extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’

46 “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” [NASB]

(4) Edwards believes that full justice must be done to biblical passages such as this and he correctly does that justice in identifying feeding the hungry and visiting the sick and clothing the naked as conditions of justification. With obedience such as this, justification shall be and without it justification shall not be. But such an affirmation does not render Edwards guilty of preaching another gospel which is no gospel. He has said that God alone is the cause of goodness, of evangelical obedience, and to God alone therefore belongs the glory. All that is necessary for obedience to be a condition of justification is that there be a genuine, necessary connection between them, and that there is. Edwards’s summary is both excellent and biblical:

If we find such a promise, that he that obeys shall be saved [as in Matthew 25], or he that is holy shall be justified; all that is needful, in order to such promises being true, is, that it be really so, that he that obeys shall be saved, and that holiness and justification shall indeed go together. That proposition may be a truth, that he that obeys shall be saved; because obedience and salvation are connected together in fact…. 

..... 

Promises may rationally be made to signs and evidences of faith, and yet the thing promised not be upon the account of the sign, but the thing signified.[41]

(5) Edwards’s attempt to preach the biblical message accurately by utilizing the cause-condition distinction makes it possible for him at the same time to answer both Arminianism and antinomianism. But this solution is not problem-free. One of the difficulties arising out of such an approach has to do with the existence of evil. If one restricts the word “cause” to God alone, then how does one explain the cause of evil in the world? Surely evil deeds arise out of evil dispositions (just as good deeds arise out of good dispositions) and Edwards affirms the unity of the race in Adam’s sin as the explanation for the sinful disposition with which all men are born.[42] But what caused the original sin?

One cannot answer, Adam’s sinful disposition, for before the first sin, his disposition was not sinful. Edwards’s only hint of an answer comes in an obscure footnote to a section of the Original Sin treatise where he seems to identify Satan as the responsible agent in the first sin.[43] Edwards does argue strongly that God is not the “author” of sin, but he fails to clarify his understanding of causation in this context and identifying Satan as the agent of the Fall serves only to push the causation question back to the origins of Satan.[44]

This problem matters because, as Joseph Conforti argues in his recent book on Samuel Hopkins, it was precisely in this area that the New Divinity “improved upon” Edwards’s ideas in the direction of a more “consistent Calvinism.”[45] That is, Hopkins (and Joseph Bellamy and Jonathan Edwards, Jr.) realized the implications of Edwards’s thought and developed a theology in which God actively and intentionally created sin so that the greater good might be realized. Both Conforti and Joseph Haroutunian (Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology) regard this development as crucial for the American theological scene, though they disagree as to whether the development was an advance or a decline. The point here, however, is simply that the questions left unanswered by Edwards’s cause-condition distinction may very well have affected in a major way the theological landscape of the colonies at that crucial time during which they were in the process of becoming the United States.

(6) Does this mean that Edwards’s terminology should be rejected because of problems it causes? Not at all—if we reject all language that presents difficulties, we shall surely be left only with “the sound of silence.” Edwards himself knew that human language is a fragile commodity. As he put it in his treatise on Freedom of Will,

Words were first formed to express external things [see Gen 1:26–28; 2:18–20 ] and those that are applied to express things internal and spiritual, are almost all borrowed and used in a sort of figurative sense. Whence they are, most of them, attended with a great deal of ambiguity and unfixedness in their signification, occasioning innumerable doubts, difficulties, and confusions, in inquiries and controversies about things of this nature.[46]

And another master of the English language, T. S. Eliot, put it even more succinctly:

... Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still….[47]

Neither Edwards nor Eliot believed that this characteristic of religious language eliminates the possibility of certain knowledge about God and his ways. The point is rather that we must recognize what Paul Ricoeur calls “the rule of metaphor” in our “God-language.”[48] The question thus is not whether the language we use is totally problem-free; rather, the question is whether in the context in which it is employed, it expresses most accurately the essence of the biblical truth with which we are dealing. Maintaining this attitude (and the hermeneutical humility which it engenders) might help the church in the future to avoid the kind of destructive internecine strife it has experienced in the past.

In terms of explaining the relationships among God’s grace, human faith, and evangelical obedience in the justification of the ungodly, the cause-condition distinction works well (not perfectly—just “well”). It makes clear to the Arminian that no ground exists for human boasting before God and it makes clear to the antinomian that obedience is an absolute necessity. It thus maintains both the proclamation (the “is”) and the exhortation (the “ought”) of the gospel. So long as the limitations of such language are made crystal clear and misunderstandings guarded against (as Edwards seeks to do in Original Sin), this distinction may be helpfully employed by those concerned to preach and to live by the whole counsel of God.

2. Edwards’s Understanding of “Fitness”

(1) The second of Edwards’s distinctive emphases in his exposition of the doctrine of justification by faith alone is what he calls “fitness” or “meetness.” Faith in Christ does not cause union with Christ but still is a condition thereof and evangelical obedience does not cause blessedness but still is a condition thereof because, Edwards argues, these entities simply belong together in the will and counsel of God. In this part of his understanding also, Edwards is fully biblical.

For Edwards, the notion of fitness pervades God’s revelation of his dealings with man. It is founded in the very being of God himself and is built into all that God created. God is three in one, the multeity of persons being resolved into the unity of the Godhead. This harmony within the diversity which is God finds expression in God’s purpose for his creation. All throughout his History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards describes in beautiful detail how the plethora of historical details which constitute the story of man and his world finds its focus in the single, electing plan of God.[49] All that happens “fits into” the narrative of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ. Thus, the omniscient God who knows every detail of human history, the omnipotent God who arranges every such detail so that it leads to the end he has ordained has from his own nature and from his own creative example provided abundant evidence that fitness is a genuine ontological reality. There are not many different plans of God; there are not several histories of redemption; all is one and the meaning of any single event may be found in its fit within the unified purpose of God.

(2) Edwards further utilizes this concept to provide the foundation for his definition of The Nature of True Virtue. Building explicitly upon his earlier study of The End For Which God Created the World, Edwards argues that true virtue involves a harmony between the will of the creature and the will of the Creator.

For the true virtue of created beings is doubtless their highest excellency, and their true goodness, and that by which they are especially agreeable to the mind of their Creator. But the true goodness of a thing, must be its agreeableness to its end, or its fitness to answer the design for which it was made. Therefore, they are good moral agents, whose temper of mind, or propensity of heart, is agreeable to the end for which God made moral agents. But, as has been shown, the last end for which God has made moral agents, must be the last end for which God has made all things.[50]

As the will of the creature fits with the revealed will of the Creator, that which the creature wills may correctly be designated truly virtuous. Edwards further develops this concept in discussing what he calls secondary beauty and in doing so provides fascinating insights of inestimable value for structuralist literary critics and for Christian aestheticians. The concept of the “fit,” the “meet” is surely one of the most central in all of Edwards’s thought.

(3) And just as surely it is fully biblical. From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, the many works of God all point to and reveal the one plan of God. Continually throughout Scripture, specific suggestions are made that the significance of events arises from their fit in the plan of God. The assertions in the NT that Jesus came “in the fulness of time” (Eph 1:10) to announce that “the time is fulfilled” (Mark 1:15) reflect that toward which all OT narratives pointed. One may seek to identify the reasons why that section of human history which saw the first advent of Christ was “the fulness of time,” but no discussions of Greek language and Roman roads can do full justice to that which God’s will sovereignly ordained. The point is that the time was just right; it was meet that Christ come when he did.

Further, the work which Jesus accomplished on behalf of the elect partakes of this same appropriateness. As the writer of Hebrews asserts, “For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings” (Heb 2:10, NASB). But that in which this notion finds fullest expression is the Second Coming of Christ, his coming in glory, his coming to make all things new. The entire book of Revelation (but particularly chapters twenty-one and twenty-two) proclaims the message that all does fit, and that the fit will be seen and recognized when the Lamb that was slain returns to rule forever and forever. The holy city is that place where all disorder, all disharmony are removed, where every experience and event contribute fittingly to the symphony of praise to the Son.

And this is precisely the vision Edwards presents as the culmination of human history. At the very end of his History of the Work of Redemption, he helps us biblically to see what the fit finally will mean.

The consideration of what has been said, may greatly serve to show us the consistency, order, and beauty, of God’s works of providence. If we behold events in any other view, all will look like confusion, like the tossing of waves; things will look as though one confused revolution came to pass after another, merely by blind chance, without any regular or certain end. But if we consider the events of providence in the light in which they have been set before us, and in which the Scriptures set them before us, they appear an orderly series of events, all wisely directed in excellent harmony and consistence, tending all to one end. The wheels of providence are not turned round by blind chance, but are full of eyes round about, (as Ezekiel represents them,) and are guided by the Spirit of God: where the Spirit goes, they go. All God’s works of providence, through all ages, meet at last, as so many lines meeting in one center. 

God’s work of providence, like that of creation, is but one. The events of providence are not so many distinct, independent works; but rather so many different parts of one work, one regular scheme. They are all united, just as the several parts of one building: there are many stones, many pieces of timber, but all are so joined, and fitly formed together, that they make but one building; they have all but one foundation, and are united at last in one top-stone. 

God’s providence may not unfitly be compared to a large and long river, having innumerable branches, beginning in different regions, and at a great distance one from another, and all conspiring to one common issue. After their very diverse and apparent contrary courses, they all collect together, the nearer they come to their common end, and at length discharge themselves at one mouth into the same ocean. The different streams of this river are apt to appear like mere confusion to us, because of our limited sight, whereby we cannot see the whole at once. A man who sees but one or two streams at a time, cannot tell what their course tends to. Their course seems very crooked, and different streams seem to run for a while different and contrary ways: and if we view things at a distance, there seem to be innumerable obstacles and impediments in the way, as rocks and mountains, and the like; to hinder their ever uniting, and coming to the ocean; but yet if we trace them, they all unite at last, all come to the same issue disgorging themselves in one into the same great ocean. Not one of all the streams fail.[51] 

Not one fails because all fit in the plan of God. Even when these different streams do appear mere confusion to us (even when a noncausal condition appears not enough of a condition, or too much of a condition), we assert the significance of each stream because God has said each fits, each plays a role in the river of life which is his redemptive purpose for man. To affirm the concept of fitness, therefore, to utilize that concept in explaining the relation of faith to union with Christ or the relationship of evangelical obedience to blessedness is to build with tools which God himself has given man.

(4) In fact, the notion of fitness also underlies all of our hermeneutical encounters with the written Word of God. The analogy of Scripture is a doctrine directly dependent on and expressive of biblical fitness. All of Scripture reveals one God and it reveals him consistently; the various parts of the biblical record (even James and Romans, even Chronicles and Kings) tell the same story, fit into the same whole. The specific purposes and perspectives of those various parts differ, but they all fit into one unified whole. Without such hermeneutical presuppositions or preunderstandings, the entire exegetical enterprise would be vain.

Fitness, then, is a biblical concept, and utilizing it may help us to appreciate something of the conditionality of faith in our union with Christ and something of the conditionality of evangelical obedience in our final blessedness. Surely it is not a concept which answers all potential questions; one might very well argue that it answers no questions, that it merely pushes the queries back one more step into the mystery of God’s sovereign will. At some point, however, any proposed explanation of any problem rests upon the same shadowy but genuine foundation. Our task is to use human language to go as far as we can biblically so as to maximize the potential our Creator has given us. This Edwards has done. Evangelical obedience fits with justification in the same sense that the time was “full” at Jesus’ birth. The one did not cause the other in either case; they just belong together.

Edwards’s use of the fitness concept therefore establishes the noncausal conditionality of obedience to justification firmly within the movement of all of redemptive history. All the streams flow together—grace, faith, obedience—and because he rules the entire process, not one of the streams shall fail. Small wonder that the Holy Spirit used Edwards’s sermons on justification so powerfully in 1734; even smaller wonder if the Spirit should use those same insights to heal and bless his church today.

Notes

1. Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls, in Northampton and the Neighboring Towns and Villages of New Hampshire, in New England in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (ed. Sereno E. Dwight and Edward Hickman; Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth, 1974) 1.347.
2. Ibid.
3. Ola Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography. (New York: Octagon Books, 1979) 160.
4. Edwards, Faithful Narrative, 347-48. See also Jonathan Edwards, “Memoirs,” in Works 1.xlii-xliii.
5. John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal: “History of New England” (ed. James Kendall Hosmer; New York: Scribner’s, 1908) 1.195.
6. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) 233–36. See also J. William T. Youngs, Jr., God’s Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700–1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1976) 82; Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Hamden, Connecticut: Shoe String, 1976), 13–14; and Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1965) 146–51.
7. Edwards, Faithful Narrative, 350.
8. John E. Smith, “Editor’s Introduction” to Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) 2.53-57.
9. In approaching Edwards’s work on justification in this manner, I am following Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966) 90–106. I am specifically rejecting Perry Miller’s argument that Edwards’s doctrine of justification was shaped by his attempt to balance “the inherent good” of Locke and “the objective good” of Newton. See Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Dell, 1949) 71–99.
10. Jonathan Edwards, “Justification By Faith Alone,” in Works (ed. Dwight) 1.622.
11. Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in ibid. 2.12-17.
12. Jonathan Edwards, A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will Which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame in ibid. 1.88.
13. Ibid.
14. Edwards, “Justification,” 622.
15. Ibid., 623.
16. Edwards, Freedom of Will, 15.
17. Ibid., 67-69.
18. See Cherry, Edwards, 100-101.
19. Edwards, “Justification,” 624.
20. Ibid., 624-25.
21. Ibid., 625.
22. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeil and transl. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) 1.569-71. John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1955) 161–73.
23. Cherry, Edwards, 107-25.
24. Jonathan Edwards, Sermon on Romans IX:18, in Works (ed. Dwight) 2.849-54.
25. Edwards, “Justification,” 626, 624.
26. Ibid., 628.
27. Jonathan Edwards, A Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue in Works (ed. Dwight) 1.122-30.
28. Cherry, Edwards, 98.
29. Edwards, “Justification,” 652.
30. Edwards, Freedom, 9.
31. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections in Works (ed. Dwight) 1.264-74.
32. Ibid., 318.
33. Edwards, “Justification,” 651.
34. Ibid., 644.
35. Ibid., 645.
36. Edwards, Freedom, 4-8, and Edwards, Affections, 264-74.
37. Edwards, Freedom, 57.
38. Edwards, “Justification,” 645.
39. Ibid., 627.
40. Ibid., 626.
41. Ibid., 642-43.
42. Jonathan Edwards, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended in Works (ed. Dwight) 1.182-87.
43. Ibid., 178.
44. Ibid., 217-20.
45. Joseph Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1981) 61. For related matters, see Conrad Wright, Beginnings, 59-90, for a persuasive argument that challenges to the doctrine of original sin accelerated the slide into unitarianism. Charles Lippy’s Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981) 60–63, presents the issue from the perspective of New England’s most influential “liberal.”
46. Edwards, Freedom, 70.
47. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” V, 149–55 in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1934) 121.
48. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1977) 216–56.
49. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, Containing the Outlines of a Body of Divinity, Including a View of Church History in a Method Entirely New in Works (ed. Dwight) 1.572-74, 612–19.
50. Edwards, True Virtue, 127.
51. Edwards, History of Redemption, 617.