Dispositional Peculiarity History, And Edwards’s Evangelistic Appeal To Self-Love

By John J. Bombaro

[John J. Bombaro is Director at The John Newton International Center for Christian Studies and Adjunct Lecturer, Religion Department, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.]

None but those that do live under the calls of the Gospel shall be saved.. .. That is God’s way and his only way of bringing men to salvation, viz. the Gospel. 

—Jonathan Edwards, MS sermon on Matthew 22:14

I. “A Strange, New Edwards”?

Jonathan Edwards categorized himself in rather unambiguous terms. His expressed theological allegiances were so lucid that for well over two centuries after his untimely death one would have been hard pressed to find any notable debate over Edwards’s theological classification. Instead, the contentious issue among schools and scholars regularly fell along lines of “claiming rights”: who more rightly could claim Edwards as their theological patriarch—Princeton or Yale, Old School or New School?[1]

Edwards unapologetically profiled himself as Christian, confessional, Calvinist. For instance, in a 1750 letter to the Reverend John Erskine (1721–1803) of Kirkintilloch, Scotland, Edwards (recently dismissed from his Northampton ministerial charge and contemplating opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic) disclosed the following admission:

You are pleased, dear Sir, very kindly to ask me whether I could sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, and submit to the Presbyterian form of church government; and to offer to use your influence to procure a call for me to some congregation in Scotland.. .. As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty: and as to the Presbyterian government, I have long been perfectly out of conceit with our unsettled, independent, confused way of church government in this land.[2]

Four years later and within the “Preface” to his magisterial A careful and strict Enquiry into The modern prevailing Notions of that Freedom of the Will (1754), Edwards, while disavowing “a dependence on Calvin” for the substance of that treatise, writes: “I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist.”[3]

Christian, confessional, Calvinist—this is Jonathan Edwards on Jonathan Edwards.

By his own words, works, and reputation, from the time he implicitly endorsed the Saybrook Platform through his attendance at Yale College to the time he affirmed the divinity of Savoy and Westminster as a requirement for ordination through to his expressed ownership of the doctrinal standards required by the Presbyterian and Reformed trustees of the College of New Jersey in the final year of his life, Jonathan Edwards stood as a stalwart, though creative and resourceful, proponent of Christian particularism in the Calvinist tradition. Or so it would seem.

Some contemporary commentators on Edwards argue that there is a difference, a striking and surprising difference, between the public Jonathan Edwards and the private Jonathan Edwards. True enough, commentators such as Anri Morimoto and Gerald R. McDermott would say, in Edwards’s published treatises he ably articulates and defends confessional Calvinism. But these writings, like his preached sermons and personal correspondence, were open to public perusal and thus, in his mature years, were skillfully crafted so as to render his theology orthodox to the scrutinizing eye of Reformed Protestantism.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, contend Morimoto and McDermott, Edwards surreptitiously experimented with heterodoxical thoughts, compromised his confessional affiliation, and pursued the logic of strange new doctrines in genuinely private notebooks and short theological essays, the most important of which are his famed ten “Miscellanies” notebooks, especially the last few notebooks. Things simply were not what they appeared to the public eye. The sage of Stockbridge may have been rethinking his commitment to confessional Calvinism and his private notebooks evidence this phenomenon.

Of course, the idea of “private Edwards” verses “public Edwards” should ring familiar to Edwards commentators and enthusiasts. Oliver Wendell Holmes floated such a thesis in 1880, when he set forth accusations concerning Edwards’s supposedly suspect trinitarianism. Holmes wrote that,

Edwards’ views appear to have undergone a great change in the direction of Arianism, or of Sabellianism, which is an old-fashioned Unitarianism, or at any rate show a defection from his former standard of orthodoxy.[4]

Holmes refers to the then unpublished Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity,[5] a short treatise comprising a number of “Miscellanies” but mainly consisting of the floating essay “Miscellanies” No. 1062. The issue then was the doctrine of God. According to Holmes, Edwards’s trinitarianism was two-faced: orthodox in public, unorthodox in private.[6] It was his private notebooks that revealed the “great change” and “defection.”

Today, however, the issue is soteriological: Edwards is particularistic in public, but sympathetically pluralistic, if not inclusivistic or (if one maintains the course of Edwards’s logic) hypothetically universalistic, in private. So writes celebrated commentator Gerald R. McDermott:

On the question of salvation, [Edwards] usually only conceded the possibility that heathen could be saved.. . .[7] 

But for Edwards there was indeed a possibility. .. Edwards is not dogmatic about the heathen being saved through truth they receive in the prisca theologia, but here [in “Miscel lanies” No. 1338] and elsewhere he opens the door to that possibility.. . .[8]

McDermott (and elsewhere Anri Morimoto) argue that Edwards was exploring in his private notebooks the possibilities of a new soteriological paradigm, one built upon a dispositional ontology—a logic of being in terms of lawlike powers and forces, in which dispositions are conceived as active and real tendencies that have ontological reality even when unexercised.

On the one hand, Morimoto says that, for Edwards, a gracious “disposition” in human beings was “all that was necessary for salvation,” but maintains in his interpretation of Edwards a distinction between those justified Christians who had their gracious disposition activated through contact with converting Christian “means and ordinances.” On the other hand, McDermott, while in fundamental agreement with Morimoto that “The inner disposition, not any particular acts and exercises, is the only essential prerequisite to salvation,”[9] an inner disposition granted to all persons as a universal benefit of Jesus Christ’s work on the cross (pace Roman Catholicism’s notion of infused prevenient grace concomitant with sacramentarianism: hence the title of Morimoto’s book),[10] nevertheless proposes that Christian “means and ordinances” (i.e., the gospel of Jesus Christ and its accompaniments) are not necessary for the conversion of the “heathen” soul. McDermott suggests that, in Edwards’s metamorphic, clandestine theology, theoretically there is enough non-Christian revelation in the world to mechanistically “trigger” the disposition and justify the religiously or philosophically inclined. But McDermott goes even further, for in his reading of Edwards’s interest in non-Christian religions, none of this soteriologizing need be christocentric. Dispositions, such that are saving, have been possessed by man since his creation:

Edwards defined a saving disposition, which is common to Christians, Old Testament Jews, and all other religionists “from the beginning of the world”: “a sense of the dangerousness of sin, and of the dreadfulness of God’s anger.. . [such a conviction of] their wickedness, that they trusted to nothing but the mere mercy of God, and then bitterly lamented for their sins” (Misc. 39).. .. No particular act, even the act of receiving Christ, is necessary [for salvation].[11]

This abandonment of Christocentrism and particularism, according to McDermott, was all part of Edwards’s progressive philosophy of history, a history that envisioned the world moving toward a millennial era of “true religion”—the kingdom of God on earth, in which all with a gracious disposition would be converted. “True religion,” but not necessarily the Christian faith, would reign on earth universally.[12]

Despite the problematic interpretations of Jonathan Edwards’s philosophy of dispositions[13] and its soteriological implications (or non-implications, as the case may be) within Anri Morimoto’s book on the subject,[14] McDermott nonetheless adopts the Morimoto thesis that Edwards indeed separated regeneration and conversion, and did so because his theology was stealthfully becoming ever more inclusivistic as a result of the logical trajectory of his dispositional ontology. In Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, Professor McDermott advances Morimoto’s work through a presentation of “A Strange, New Edwards,”[15] one that was (secretly?) exercised by the “scandal” of traditional Christian particularism and set out to show the deists of his day that non-Christian religions of the world also encased “the most important truths of Christianity,”[16] such that were potentially, if not de jure, salvific.

A pluralistic—if not universalistic—inclined Edwards would indeed be “A Strange, New Edwards.” Yet, as I have written elsewhere,[17] Edwards’s soteriology hardly suits an inclusivistic Edwards, let alone a pluralistic or universalistic one.[18] Indeed, neither his vision of God, nor his conception of redemptive history, nor even his philosophy of dispositions—as innovative as they may be—lend themselves to the proposals of Morimoto and McDermott. Edwards remained consistent to his theological profession, both publicly and privately.

What then are we to make of Edwards’s sixty or more “Miscellanies” entries on “heathen religions” and pagan sages to which McDermott draws our attention and marshals as evidence of Edwards’s later theological reconfiguration toward inclusivism?[19] What role did non-Christian religions play within his philosophy of history? Further, what was the climate or context within which Edwards wrote these entries? Were they penned in connection to some ongoing controversy or (as the case frequently was with Edwards) were they genre items germane to a future project or polemical treatise? The answer to this last question is “Yes”: Edwards was busy collating materials not for a reassessment of Christian particularism or a pluralistic eschatology that would recapitulate a universalistic protology, but rather a body of divinity “in an entire new method,” being “thrown into the form of an history,” which he called “A History of the Work of Redemption,”[20] that would have been (among other things) a resolute defense of Judeo-Christian particularism and the necessity of the revealed Gospel for salvation within that, and only that, covenant community.

In order to follow the logic of Edwards’s preparations for his unfinished magnum opus we first investigate the climate or context that prompted Edwards to the project, namely the challenge deistic Enlightenment thinkers marshaled against historic Christian particularity.

1.a. The Context: Enlightenment Religion

McDermott’s Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods exhibits considerable erudition in its account of the deist challenge to the limitations of Christian peculiarity. John Toland, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and other deists, with some of whom Edwards was well acquainted,[21] concentrated on issues of goodness and justice and, consequently, the nature of God and His relation to rational beings in their critical reassessment of historic Christian theology and soteriology. As McDermott aptly states it, “For it was finally a debate about the relationship between ‘natural religion’ based on abstract principles and ‘revealed religion,’ said to be rooted in the religious experience recorded in Scripture.”[22] For Enlightenment freethinkers, the widely celebrated Newtonian paradigm offered a new, efficient world emancipated from the divine panopticon. This coupled with avant-garde Lockean philosophy, in which Locke established the maxim that “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with the clear and self-evident Dictates of Reason, has a right to be urged, or assented to, as a Matter of Faith,”[23] only served to embolden deists toward the consideration that even the restrictivist parameters of salvation dogma could be radically reassessed, and reassessed in their entirety. This, of course, would have only been in keeping with the Cambridge Platonists, who fortified the Pelagian/semi-Pelagian belief that unaccompanied human reason was sufficient to recognize and appropriate divine truths to its own eternal benefit.[24]

For deists like Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Toland, and Tindal, the traditional Christian notions of revelation and salvation through Jesus Christ alone were unjust to the vast portion of humanity. Consequently, time-honored doctrines surrounding Jesus Christ’s substitutionary atonement and propitiatory sacrifice, and especially the distinguishing tenets of Calvinism, were repudiated in toto. Likewise, the Judeo-Christian monopoly on revelation was not contested and evenly distributed among the world’s religions, but made redundant in its entirety. “Natural religion” supplanted revealed religion for Enlightenment thinkers: God spoke to all peoples through nature and reason. As reports from merchants, explorers, adventurers, and scholars poured forth details, controversialists told of scores of non-Christianized civilizations whose morality eclipsed their “sophisticated” Western counterparts. By arguing that Greco-Roman mythology and philosophy, as well as highly ethical non-Christian religions, were self-contrived, self-defined, and successful, or, in other words, that pagan perspicacity and “heathen” religious systems developed civilized ethical worldviews independent from biblical revelation, the deists not only naturalized religion but negated the Christian necessity for divine revelation—along, of course, with its particularist message.

In short, according to the deists and their ilk, God had provided a mediator for all mankind when He created man with reason to direct his behavior and beliefs. Therefore an incarnate Redeemer was superfluous at best, repugnant at worst. To quote McDermott, “for the deists, particularity and goodness were mutually exclusive terms.”[25] If God was good, He was fair; and nothing was fairer than living by the light of reason and nature, no matter where on earth one dwelt, nor when one did so. The “true religion” of the world was, therefore, ahistorical (not bound to redemptive history but perpetual from creation) and acultural (not confined to Semites or Christianized Gentiles). Instead, it was natural—the product of the moral character of the heart directed by universal reason.

1.b. Edwards’s Rejoinder

Enlightenment religion found revelation the epistemological chink in Christianity’s armor, and history, the deists believed, substantiated their position. Edwards himself quickly perceived that the issue with “the more considerable Deists” was not so much ontological and etiological, as it had been with Hobbes and Mandeville, but epistemological and moral—recurring themes in the philosophy of history.[26] The burning issue over the will, of course, was foundational to the deist scheme: self-determination empowered humanity to attain to “true religion” without revelation or supernatural grace. A chief reason why Edwards attacked the basis of Arminian thought was that it accommodated deistic principles and provided, as Paul Ramsey put it, “the breach through which deism poured, [to] the abandonment of Christianity.”[27] In essence, Arminian theology put the power of salvation in the hands of the individual; it personalized salvation and made it readily available by de-emphasizing localized Christian “means and ordinances,” that is, the gospel revealed through word, sacrament, and sacred community. As the deists saw it, self-determination was “divinity’s greatest gift to humanity”;[28] their doctrines helped to vindicate, before the eyes of Europeans, the religious practices of the heathen, who, though historically and culturally isolated from institutionalized Christian means, nevertheless possessed that universal religious ability of self-determination and, comparatively speaking, moral virtue. Indeed, the heathen appeared to live more righteously than the gospel-saturated Europeans. Special revelation held no advantage. Spiritual regeneration availed no more than moral reformation.

Edwards determined that deism’s infiltration into Christian orthodoxy or, rather, orthodoxy’s mutation into deism occurred by three subtle steps, culminating in a decisive fourth: (i) an aberrant opinion of man’s mental (i.e., reasoning and volitional) abilities; (ii) an extra-biblical appraisement of man’s moral propensities and constitution; (iii) an anthropocentric worldview leading to a naturalistic moral philosophy; and (iv) open and unforgivable apostasy.

Having determined the priority of the issues to be addressed, he began his calculated counterattack with Freedom of the Will, a treatise aimed to demolish the “idol of free will” and destabilize the mechanism by which deistic principles were propagated within the Church, namely, Arminian theology.[29] Next came The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758), which at its heart proposed to show, by reason, empirical observation, and Scripture, that man is not by nature innately good (another pillar of Enlightenment religion) but inherently sinful. This was a clarion call in support of an authentically Christian anthropology (and corresponding soteriology), as well as elenctic exposé of John Taylor’s heretical model of Christianity-as-deism.

Two Dissertations (posthumously published in 1765) was the adroit polemic against the third phase of deist ideology. And here is where Edwards intends to reclaim world history from the deist camp, namely, through an opposing theocentric worldview that proposed the two-pronged thesis: “[God] makes himself his end” in creation; and, God is a communicating being.[30] Thus,

While deists condemned God to silence outside the secret dictates of the inner mind, Edwards proclaimed that God was ever communicating, and through many and diverse media—not only through Scripture but also through nature, history, and the history of religions.[31]

God’s ultimate end in creation includes innumerable subordinate ends that envelop every thing, person, and moment in world history, a history in which the vestiges of revelation remain with every culture and time, to greater or lesser degrees. Of course, neither A Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World nor The Nature of True Virtue explicitly bears this out, but his unwritten magnum opus, which he in fact named “A History of the Work of Redemption” would have done so.[32]

There were four central points to make in the appeal to history. First, contrary to the deist claim that pagan wisdom and non-Christian religious systems largely developed independent of revelation, Edwards’s counterarguments were intended to show that both Greco-Roman philosophies and heathen religions were in fact dependent upon revelation.[33] Secondly, he intended to provide opposing evidence from the same historical theatre as the freethinkers concerning the sufficiency of human reason (and will) to uncover the true God. Thirdly, he meant to show that the deists were asking the wrong questions—”true religion” was not primarily about morality but doxology: true virtue was a consequence of true doxology, both of which were revelatory items. And fourthly, over-against the Enlightenment accusation that Christianity—especially Christian dogma—was static thinking of antiquity, Jonathan Edwards asserted that Christian eschatology was fused with history, which was not static but rather moving toward a teleological goal. The history of the deists was neither outside nor above the linear progression of redemptive history. The movement of history belongs to Yahweh and the fate of the deists and those who sympathized with their worldview is tethered to the Christ’s bilateral redemptive and apocalyptic reed. We consider each point in turn.

1.b.i. The “Trickle-Down” Effect

McDermott’s research to substantiate Edwards’s first point remains unprecedented and comprehensive. Quotes are furnished from dozens of “Miscellanies” entries, as he evidences Edwards’s contentions:

Contrary to what freethinkers say, [Edwards] charges, philosophy has given little or no knowledge of the true God, and what true knowledge existed among the heathen had come from revelation (Misc. 986). The history of religion is a history of degradation, decline, and the corruption of an original pure deposit of revelation (Misc. 986).[34]

The heathen, according to Edwards, received their wisdom and knowledge of God not through “natural religion,” reason and nature alone, “but by tradition from revelation given to the fathers of their nations.”[35] Thus, in addition to the conventional Calvinistic appeal to divine general revelation, Edwards also appropriated the so-called prisca theologia (“ancient theology”), a theory propounded, for example, by Theophilus Gale in his multi-volume Court of the Gentiles (1669–77) and Hugo Grotius’s influential De Jure Belli et Pacis (1625), which in principle taught that God’s special revelation as it pertained to the “HISTORY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT FROM MOSES’ TIME” was “CONFIRMED FROM HEATHEN TRADITIONS.”[36] Edwards was concerned to substantiate the two-pronged point that “HEATHENS had what they had of truth in divine things by TRADITION from the first fathers of nations, or from the Jews”[37] and that this divine “truth” or revelation trickled-down through non-Jewish cultures to ancient Greece and Rome, India and Africa, and even to China and the Americas. The idea was to demonstrate that every major thinker from Socrates and Plato to every leading religion from Islam and Confucianism to the animism of the Iroquois and Delaware Indians were indebted to God’s special oral (and sometimes transcribed) revelation to Adam, the line of Seth, the Patriarchs, and, particularly, Moses’ Pentateuch.

In his refusal to concede the point that five-sixths of the world has been left without revelation, that is, to grant that God is unfair, Edwards, as McDermott explains, “insisted that human beings before the advent of Christ and outside the borders of Christian nations were not and are not deprived of revelation, as the deists claimed, but have been fairly inundated with the voice of God.”[38] If the divine revelation filtered down through ancient sources—which provided true knowledge of God and sundry other items of divinity—were not enough, the heathens also possess ever-present typological forms in nature, history, and circumstances, as well as their consciences, to educate them beyond the light of reason.[39]

His strategy to portray the history of the work of redemption as “a series of revelations by God to the heathen”[40] proved its point against the deists, even if many of his sources were unverifiable or simply erroneous.[41] God did not “lock out” the heathen, but blessed them with enough light to glorify and thank Him, in addition to providing them with wisdom for societal living. Therefore, says McDermott, “In Edwards’s new history God was still good, in the context of the new knowledge of pluralism, because knowledge of God the Redeemer had been available from the beginning.”[42]

1.b.ii. Because of Reason, Revelation Is Necessary

According to Edwards, the deists had it backwards: history did not show the sufficiency but the deficiency and futility of human reason (and will) to provide true knowledge of God. Certainly there were qualitative similarities between Judeo-Christianity and Plato’s “The One” or Plotinus’s “The Good”[43] or even the conceptual and moral thought of non-Christian religions—such was the inevitable residual result of prior revelation; but the dogmatic expression and praxis of pagan philosophers and heathen religions were, in the words of McDermott, “just so many manifestations of the human proclivity to deny and distort the original revelations given to the fathers of the nations.”[44]

Edwards’s theory of reason argues in “Miscellanies” No. 1338 that its sufficiency in religion lies only in the ability to “confirm” the reasonableness of an idea p already discovered but is generally incapable of ascertaining p to start with. The reason heathens were/are not Jews or have become Christians is because they have largely perverted, suppressed, and ignored God’s progressive revelation to them. So far from advancing mankind in terms of true religious knowledge, natural-man’s reason and will have been the foremost impediments.

The issue again becomes one of dispositions—the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Only this time, conscious of the Enlightenment—à la Lockean—challenge to allow “Nothing that is contrary to. .. clear and self-evident Dictates of Reason. .. as a Matter of Faith” (i.e., the validity of revealed truths must be confirmed by reason), Edwards sets forth his powerful apology concerning the epistemic access regenerate as opposed to unregenerate reason possesses, the thesis concerning the “new spiritual sense.” He makes the issue not one of hardware (his doctrine of natural ability stipulates that the rational mind is fully capable of speculative knowledge of God), but software: the unregenerate can “agree” with the notional reasoning of believers, but they can never sense, feel, or appreciate its truth or reality, “for the disposition. .. must necessarily be changed first.”[45] For the unregenerate a disposition of “holy consent”—spiritual sensibilities to the aesthetic dimension of reality—remains entirely lacking. Consequently, the heathen abide in “darkness in religious things.”[46] The difference between unregenerate and regenerate reason leveled the epistemic playing field: reason has warped boundaries; revelation is necessary.

So heathen all over the world were given enough light to enjoy true religion—if they would only take advantage of it.. .. The heathen usually did not have the right disposition to “improve their advantages,” but Edwards had proven his point. Despite the postponement of the Messiah’s coming until thousands of years after the Creation, knowledge of true religion was nevertheless available during those years, and not only to the Jews. So Edwards’s fairly traditional chronology could still stand against deist charges of injustice and cruelty. His God was vindicated.[47]

1.b.iii. A New Historical Agenda: The Wrong Answer to the Right Question

It is only when we get to the third point of Edwards’s alternative representation of history that McDermott’s otherwise valuable and scholarly study disappoints by suggesting a soteriological agenda for Edwards that is essentially irreconcilable with the whole character of his Calvinistic thought and corpus. However remarkable it may be that Edwards, on the outskirts of the New World frontier, privately amassed data on every religious item from the activities of the Pope to the writings of Muhammad in order to develop an elaborate scheme for the roles other religions had played and were playing in the drama of redemption, he was not pursuing an alternative salvation scheme for the heathen nor did he “open the door to that possibility,” as McDermott proposes.[48] Such a door would have to be dragged from some other written corpus into Edwards’s theological vision and tacked on to the exterior of his own writings.

When Edwards sets worship as the focal point of “true religion” he offers an opinion opposite to the deists’ worldview. Not man’s morality, but God’s glorification is at center. Although he conceives that both devotees of the Living God and those who pay homage to idols offer worship as a response to revelation, yet there are strict parameters as to what constitutes “true” (i.e., acceptable) worship.[49] Here McDermott is ambivalent. On the one hand, he reproduces Edwards’s qualifications for “true worship”—a new disposition and participation in the divine;[50] on the other hand, he nullifies their significance as qualifications: dispositions become universal and participation in the divine is only a matter of coming into contact with elements of primary special revelation apparently residually present in nearly every socio-religious community.

According to McDermott, Edwards’s “new approach to soteriology” simply holds that an inner religious consciousness—a new disposition—is “the only prerequisite to salvation. .. faith is subsumed by the category of disposition.”[51] Repeating Morimoto, McDermott says that disposition functions as the ontological ground of forensic imputation. As McDermott himself puts it:

Martin Luther’s salvation by faith alone becomes for Edwards salvation by faith primarily. While Luther emphasizes that in justification sinners are counted as righteous, Edwards insists that sinners are actually made holy in the act of regeneration.[52]

Under this account, Edwards’s emphasis on disposition as primary and faith as secondary undermines not only his Reformed but also the Reformation contention that salvation is the justification of the ungodly and, therefore, the unholy. Instead, salvation is the bare possession of a saving disposition, which, de facto, renders one holy. Justification is subsequently grounded in the holy disposition of the human person.[53]

Following this line of thought, McDermott suggests a new perspective on Edwards’s interest in the heathen and history. He portrays an Edwards who, while in the process of not only attempting to circumvent the deists’ attack on orthodoxy’s epistemology, but also in his collative studies on non-Christian religions, observed in the heathen the same exercises of disposition peculiar to Christian contexts and concluded that they, too, can obtain justification but through non-Christian means. All evidence begged this conclusion: Isaac Barrow, Samuel Clarke, Ralph Cudworth, Daniel DeFoe, and others provided seemingly incontrovertible evidence that some heathens worshipped, perhaps without knowing it, the true God.[54] There also was evidence of revealed religion in everything ranging from trinitarian elements in Dao-de-jing and messianic foreshadows in I-Ching to incarnational theology in Greco-Roman “pagan” philosophers and propitiatory doctrines in Native American animism and, so, a seminal gospel nearly everywhere. Of course, the potential efficacy of Jesus Christ’s redemptive work could easily infuse a saving disposition in every person born into the world. Indeed, the dynamics of heathen moral behavior and religious systems tended to confirm it. If all these things were the case, according to McDermott, then Edwards could not but draw the conclusion that the revelatory items, which were not entirely despoiled over the years and present in a variety of forms throughout the world, could induce a generic faith-act for justification. Thus the history of God’s special revelation should not be interpreted in narrow, restrictivistic terms, but more broadly: God desires the conversion of the heathen for their happiness, which, in turn, makes Him happy. Yet they are never “lost” in an absolute sense—they have salvation in a disposition and, bear in mind, justification is only an encounter away.

According to McDermott, the scope of the historical redemption drama did not narrow prior to the millennial age. Rather, due to the “progressive nature of revelation,” it could only widen; for “In Edwards’s view a saving disposition was nearly always a disposition to receive Christ.”[55] Consequently, the progress of revelatory-redemption history neither served to render non-Christians all the more “inexcusable” for their idolatry and religious “darkness,” nor did it hold a preparatory function (either to facilitate pedagogical intercourse with the Jews or prepare the Gentiles for a future encounter with the gospel), per traditional Calvinism. Instead, in keeping with McDermott’s reading of Edwards, advancing revelation effects a greater, even global, conversion-cum-justification of the masses. Jesus Christ would reign on earth, but not necessarily over Christians: the kingdom of God is more generous than that.

Aside from the misunderstanding and misappropriation of Edwardsean dispositions, the difficulty with this reading lies in the fact that Edwards’s corpus does not accurately support it. To start with, instead of opposing Luther, Edwards can be seen joining the Wittenberg Reformer’s “Disputation Against Scholastic Theology” through his conviction that that which preceded conversion was not a disposition, but an indisposition and active rebellious and unbridled selfishness.[56] As a result, Edwards sustained throughout his public preaching ministry a restrictivist soteriology that required regeneration and forensic imputation for “true religious worship.” For example, just as his Northampton congregation heard him preach in 1733 that “those that die heathen [God] will prey upon and Exert his Cruelty Upon forever,” so too, in 1751, his Housatonnuk and Mohawk auditors in Stockbridge heard (through an interpreter) that, all those who “don’t worship the true God that made the world and Jesus Christ his Son” go to hell.[57] Scores of sermons could be cited that (a) insist on the necessity of regeneration, (b) equate the heathen with the “lost,” and (c) speak of the inevitability of judgment, eternal torments, and salvation through faith in Christ alone. Consider, however, a small sample of sermon “doctrines” from 1746 through the end of his tenure at Stockbridge in January 1758:

• Matthew 13:47–50(1746): “Wicked men will hereafter be cast into a furnace of fire.”
• Exodus 9:12–16 (1747): “They that will not yield to the power of God’s word shall be broken by the power of his hand.”
• Ezekiel 22:14 (1741, 1755): “Since God has undertaken to deal with impenitent sinners, they shall neither shun the threatened misery, nor deliver themselves out of it, nor can they bear it.”[58]
• Revelation 6:15–16 (1732, 1755): “That wicked men will hereafter earnestly wish to be turned to nothing and forever cease to be that they may escape the wrath of God.”
• 1 John 3:10 (1756): “All mankind through the whole world are one of these two sorts, either God’s people or the devil’s people” (p. 1).
• Revelation 6:16 (1746/7, 1757): “The weight of rocks and mountains is light in comparison of that wrath of God that shall hereafter come on ungodly men” (p. 1).
• Mark 10:17–27 (1743, 1757): “Obs[ervation]. 1. There are many persons that have a great desire to have eternal life and seek it with some earnestness, that yet never obtain it.”

From 1750 through to his departure for Princeton, Edwards frequently re-preached sermons from the 1730s and 40s, retaining in almost every case their doctrinal content that repeatedly articulated an unmistakable particularist theology requiring the new birth, God-given holiness and Jesus Christ’s righteousness, and defensive treatments of hell.[59] Which is to say, Edwards was hardly dissatisfied, embarrassed, or “scandalized” with his theological development in the 1730s. Indeed, it would be extremely difficult to show any deviation whatsoever in his restrictivist soteriology from the mid-1730s through 1758, the year of his death.[60]

Likewise, his (semi-private, not private) “Miscellanies” notebooks[61] reveal a particularist account of history and redemption and purport the same prerequisites for “true worship.” Here we need only consider “Miscellanies” No. 1357, one of Edwards’s last, in which he records from John Brine (1703–65) the “defects” of “heathen morality” and “pagan philosophers[‘] morality” for the express purpose of indicating their categorical lack of “true virtue.”[62] Without “true virtue” true worship is blind worship.[63] God does not receive it for the same reason that “common morality” and “inordinate self-love” are not truly virtuous—there is no dispositional union with the Mediator through the Spirit, that is, no holiness. As he previously said in “Miscellanies” No. 1153: “Other kinds of sincerity of desires and endeavours” are “good for nothing in God’s sight [and are] not accepted with him as of any weight or value to recommend, satisfy, excuse, or counter-balance.” He continues in the same entry to make his repudiation of the principal doctrine of Enlightenment religion complete:

Hence we learn that nothing appears in the reason and nature of things, for the consideration of any moral weight or validity of that former kind of sincerity that has been spoken of,[64] at all obligating us to believe or leading us to suppose, that God has made any positive promises of salvation or grace, or any saving assistance, or any spiritual benefit whatsoever to any endeavors, strivings, prayers, or obedience of those that hitherto have no true virtue or holiness in their hearts though we should suppose all the sincerity, and the utmost degree of endeavor which it is possible to be in a person without holiness.[65]

In a second corollary with the heading, “SALVATION OF THE HEATHEN,” Edwards is more specific as he flatly rejects the possibility of non-christocentric salvation in any form: “Hence we learn that nothing appears in the reason and nature of things.. . that God will reveal Christ, and give the necessary means of grace, or some way or other bestow true holiness and saving grace, and so eternal salvation to those heathen that are sincere.” The point is that they neither have a gracious disposition nor any ability to exercise true virtue and, consequently, to offer true worship.[66] Nor, in fact, do they have any recourse outside “the necessary means of grace,” namely, the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in the covenant-keeping God, which, in Edwards, is not simply a post-Advent phenomenon.

Thus it would be a mistake to say that the second treatise in Two Dissertations (or even the first treatise!), that is, The Nature of True Virtue, was exclusively or essentially concerned with Scottish moral sentimentalists; it had the foundering of deists more immediately in view.[67] In Edwards’s carefully calculated rejoinder, the treatise The End for which God Created the World lays the foundation of a theocentric worldview, while The Nature of True Virtue tears up the moorings of the deistic worldview. There can be little doubt that their collective thesis would have been the centerpiece of his unfinished magnum opus.

There is no indication in either Edwards’s private or public records that he favored or was developing a non-particularistic salvation scheme. In fact, the evidence holds the opposite true. To be sure, he believed that pre-Israelite characters such as Melchizedek enjoyed salvation, as well as the “Old Testament church”—God effectually working through the Word-based protoevangelium revelation first given to their antediluvian fathers and then to them.[68] Nevertheless, the same could not be said about Greco-Roman thinkers, Chinese philosophers, or (prior to the New Testament dispensation) non-Jewish religions and (subsequent to the First Advent) non-Christian religions. Though Edwards held that the sages of Athens and Rome were “eminent for many moral virtues” derived from ancient revelation, yet without “true virtue” obtained from the God of the Hebrew religion and the “means” pertaining thereto, their morality was but splendida peccata and their theological insights “almost” and only “seemingly” divine truths.[69] But nobody according to Edwards is almost saved: “heathens” and “infidels” who “die in unbelief” and “don’t worship the true God. .. and Jesus Christ his Son,” quite plainly, are “destroyed.”[70] Edwards’s dispositional soteriology, so far from offering (in the words of McDermott) “A Possibility of Reconciliation” for the heathen, actually accentuates the particularistic dimensions of his philosophical-theology.

So while the Cambridge Platonists may have argued that the most important truths of Christianity had been propagated universally from the beginning, and that those truths chiefly pertained to worship and happiness, and so we may have Jonathan Edwards echoing John Smith, yet in Edwards true worship and happiness have their contexts exclusively in light of God revealed as Redeemer. McDermott makes the heart of this gospel message, perhaps inadvertently, peripheral for Edwards, which it certainly was not.

The manuscript evidence in Edwards’s corpus tells a different story to that of McDermott. The “Miscellanies,” sermons, letters, and treatises present a God who safeguards the aesthetic and moral qualify of the worship He receives by:

1. Having it mediated through Jesus Christ;
2. Emanating it from Himself, receiving it to Himself (the indwelling Spirit), and re-emanating it back again and thereby replicating Himself, by Himself (the Son); and
3. Employing means—very specific means—so as to control and precisely determine every component of the closed, not open, process;
4. And all within a covenantal context.

Consequently, the heathen are subject to what is called in Reformed theology, “circumstantial unbelief”—an apology of theologians dating back to Augustine’s On the City of God, which taught that God exercises judgment on particular individuals or (especially) people groups and nations by sovereignly and justly withholding the means to the external call of salvation. Edwards owned this doctrine in its entirety. As a matter of fact, it is a regulative principle in his philosophy of history. His theocentric worldview holds that God unfolds a program of redemption for His ad extra glorification, but that that process is historical and, significantly, means-centered and means-identifiable.

II. The Redemption Discourse, Phasing, and the Moorings of Preparationism

Aside from the polemical appeal to history, Edwards also found the concept of chronological development constructive for systematics. This comes out in his 1739 thirty-sermon series, A History of the Work of Redemption, where he provides for himself an objective model and methodological foundation for his theological perspective, which he had been striving toward since his teenage conversion.[71] Ultimately, the strategy of the “Redemption Discourse” discloses (in John F. Wilson’s phraseology) the culmination of Edwards’s “technical soteriological achievement,” the great effort toward “a final synthesis” of his theological, exegetical, and philosophical thought in a persuasive “historical or mythic narrative.”[72]

To avoid wrongly construing Edwards’s purpose in Work of Redemption, it must be understood that it is not primarily a historical work, but rather a theological treatise within a historical framework.[73] As Stephen R. Holmes and Amy Plantinga Pauw have shown how the interrelationships within the Trinity function as the theological fulcrum for Edwards’s understanding of soteriology (and, indeed, of all theology),[74] so it is within a historical framework that God’s work of redemption is best made intelligible and communicable. For Edwards, the theoretical infrastructure and foundation of theology is a Trinity-effected redemption, which is best explained and understood within the biblically disclosed time-boundaries given to the subject.

By the “Redemption Discourse” Edwards intends to (re)align what was initially his auditors’ perspective and appraisal of time/history and space to an inherently valuable biblical account of spatiotemporality. Beyond his growing anxieties about deism and New England’s incipient Arminianism, the impetus behind these intentions emerged from certain sociological developments that occurred in Northampton, which also provided occasion for the original publicizing of his historically integrated redemption-theology. Space does not permit a proper examination of these events, but suffice it to say that, with the anticlimactic denouement of the 1734/5 awakening, spiritual declension began to settle in amongst Edwards’s parishioners. “Backsliding” in all of its ugly forms required addressing.[75] The mood Edwards perceived from his congregations communicated to him that not only was Christianity’s role being marginalized in the spheres of business, politics, and society, but his role too. Christianity’s pervasiveness was, little by little, vanishing from all aspects of everyday life. As his personal letters and sermons show, he could not help but wonder if the evils of Arminian antinomianism or, worse, deistic secularism, were infiltrating his Puritan enclave.

Despite adjustments to his homiletical technique, Edwards’s early attempts to stabilize and navigate his congregation through these low points were only met with continued stolidity and regression. He therefore altered his rhetorical strategy further. Wilson H. Kimnach comments that in the closing years of the 1730s, Edwards exhibits a distinct tendency to “write more complex sermons and, finally, sermon series.”[76] By taking one doctrine or principle and attempting to exploit all its potential in an extended series, Edwards was able to string together several intimately and tangentially related theological, philosophical, biblical, and ethical themes, issues, and concepts and present them with a sense of continuity and pervasive relevance. In other words, the sermon series became the most efficient way, short of a treatise, to communicate the depth and scope of the Christian worldview.

The “Redemption Discourse” was his most ambitious “worldview” series. As a theological work, it systematically expanded the ultimate unity of the spiritual and material, the local and global, the divine and the human spheres: the God of Northampton was no deistic conception. By casting the project in an elementary historical framework, Edwards places the urgent and the mundane affairs of mankind in the context of eternity and, in so doing, critically evaluates the projects and dealings of his colonial auditors and even “Old Light” antagonists and Enlightenment opponents within the eternal plan of the Trinity.

Thus Edwards strategically used the “Redemption Discourse” as a pastoral tool to adjust community and personal perspectives by instilling sacredness to all time and space. “The work of God,” he taught, “is but one. ‘Tis.. . but.. . one scheme, one contrivance.”[77] We have already noted the one goal by which the scheme becomes one, namely, “God created the world to provide a spouse and kingdom for his Son.” Now Edwards builds on this premise to emphasize God’s, and therefore true religion’s, continued importance by connecting all time, all nations, and all personal histories and futures, with redemption history.

2.a. Three Major Divisions

There are three sources which Edwards consults for a holistic view of redemption history: Scripture history; biblical prophetic history; and the secular history of philosophers, historians, and rhetoricians. From these literary sources, he discerns three major divisions in God’s work of redemption. These are distinct segments or periods that mark out different stages in its constitutive “history”:

1. Preparation—”The first reaching from the fall of man to Christ’s incarnation”
2. Accomplishment/Achievement—”The second from Christ’s incarnation till his resurrection, or the whole time of his humiliation”
3. Application/Realization—”The third from thence to the end of the world”[78]

The inference is that preparation leads to salvation “purchased” by the life and death of Jesus Christ, which is then applied to the church, until the consummation of the age: “So that the whole dispensation as it includes the preparation and the imputation and application and success of Christ’s redemption is here called the Work of Redemption.”[79] The three periods are subdivisions, therefore, of one organic process, “the Work of Redemption.” Nevertheless, each period possesses distinctive characteristics.

The first of the three is discussed in sermons “Two” through “Twelve.” It is defined by his conventional Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. The Jewish Scriptures not only point to the coming of Messiah, but also define him and explain his anticipated work, albeit in figural and typological schemes.

The second “great period” is the center of history, “the fullness of time” when the Son of God was incarnate. Referring back to the first period from christological “Sermon Eighteen,” Edwards teaches that “all that success of Christ’s redemption that was before [the incarnation] was only preparatory and was by way of anticipation, as some few fruits are gathered before the harvest. There was no more success before Christ came than God saw needful to prepare the way for his coming.”[80] This is to say, the few who were redeemed in the world prior to the First Advent were necessarily associated with the preparatory means, that is, the Hebrew nation with the Hebrew Scriptures. As we shall see, for Edwards, means availability is what determines the salvific status of the nations.

We now focus, however, on the “preparation” period, the first great periodization of the “Work of Redemption,” because it is here in which Edwards gives so much attention to the positive aspects of pagan thinkers and “heathen” religions. In the “Redemption Discourse,” preparatory periods and activities contextualize their proximity to and agency within the divine work, but only in accordance with the two technical uses Edwards reserves for the term “preparation.”

First, he means it temporally. By the linear unfolding of the work of redemption where one event leads into or precedes another, God, as it were, sets the stage or prepares for the next episode or period, building to the great christic event.[81] In this way, Edwards establishes a connection between two events and/or persons in such a way that the preceding event (the preparation) is not only reflected in the next event, but the next event involves and develops its prooemium. However, Edwards insists that the essential linkage between them has nothing to do with temporal or causal considerations. Rather, both events are constitutively linked to divine providence. God decrees one thing to the next in the historia salutis according to “his good pleasure,” agreeable to the pactum salutis—the eternal compact by which the Triune God unfolds His covenant promises, plans, and purposes in spatiotemporality to achieve an ultimate end, the incarnation, and a supreme telos, the consummation of the age.[82]

Looking back then, one of the first great movements of progression in the work of redemption was the separating and preparing of a people and nation from which the Messiah would come.[83] Another example was the “final dispensation,” from the Diaspora to the first Advent, which marked the preparation of the Gentile world through the Jewish religion and messianic expectation. In pagan world events, Cyrus prepared the way for the Jews to return to Canaan; the destruction of the Persian Empire, which preceded the emergence of the Greek, led to a universal language by means of which the Hebrew Scriptures could be disseminated in script and discussion. Consequently, the proliferation of learning and philosophy, Semitic and Hellenistic, paved the way for the future propagation of the gospel message. And lastly, the pax Romana settled world events but also emphasized the bondage nature of the world, both of which were important for the stage in which the Messiah would enter: “The great works of God in the world during this whole space of time were all preparatories to this.”[84] Thus, the heathens had their positive roles in the temporal preparation for the Christ.

The second technical usage of “preparation” relates to the inner-structure of redemption theology itself. Again, not by any inherent causal connection, but according to the aesthetic “fitness” of the divine will, there is present in the work of redemption a pattern by way of ordering and identifying the process. Whether at the cosmic, logical, temporal, or personal level, the process is “ordinarily” distinguishable through its triadic pattern: preparation, achievement, realization.[85] And although this pattern resembles the programmatic series of the old Puritan preparationist model of contiguity, where each standardized step is predictably followed by another, yet it possesses a depth dimension beyond the personal level, rendering it paradigmatic by virtue of the universal elements within and interrelatedness of all redemptive activity, whether in time or humanity, heaven or earth.

The common elements of the work of redemption (preparation, achievement, realization) obtain “objective” status as properties of the historia salutis and by a necessary antecedent relation, the pactum salutis. Consequently, while the “Redemption Discourse” makes use of a branching structure, or the pattern of subordination of parts within the logical framework, it is, nevertheless, theologically governed by the threefold division of preparation/ achievement/ realization. Equally important for Edwards is their relatedness to Scripture. Since the work of redemption is itself a matter of divine revelation, the theoretical objectivity of the common elements can only be authenticated if they are inherently biblical. This, however, is not a problem. For Edwards, not only are the patterns and concepts implicitly and explicitly present in the Bible, but also the terminology: hence, the employment of the biblical language of “promise,” “performance,” and “preservation” as interchangeable terminology for his triadic pattern of “preparation,” “achievement,” and “realization.”[86]

At the level or perspective of the divine, preparation corresponds with the Triune “confederation” decreeing the work of redemption, providence, and creation. Achievement means the incarnation, while realization happens through the salvific work of Jesus Christ in His sin bearing, crucifixion, and resurrection. The final judgment and Christ’s surrendering all things to the Father is the consummation. At the historical level, where Edwards divides “this whole space of time into three periods,” preparation compares with the fall of man to the incarnation; achievement to “Christ’s incarnation till his resurrection, or the whole time of his humiliation”; and realization concurs “from thence to the end of the world. “[87] Finally, at the personal, corporate, or national level, preparation relates to the providences and means of grace associated to the “external calling” of the gospel, which effectually culminate in salvation, the achievement. Realization is identified with divine preservation through to heavenly glorification. Thus, the personal, subjective, or interior level, which may be spoken of in terms of a larger scale—a religion or a nation—is isomorphic of the historical. The historical, in turn, mirrors the divine. It is noteworthy that, at the personal, corporate, or national level, preparation may take one of two courses: either preparation for salvation or preparation for damnation.

Contrary to the inclusivistic redemptive agendas of Morimoto and McDermott, Edwards pursues an interpretation of redemption history with two distinct paths for two distinct categories of people. Both paths, however, are determined by their moment-to-moment access to the progressive revelatory means of salvation.[88]

III. The Mediator of Means

In Work of Redemption, Edwards sets forth the one axiomatic requirement for reconciliatory possibilities between God and man—a mediator. When man sinned, “God the Father would have no more to do with man immediately.. .. He would henceforth have no concern with man but only through a mediator [i.e. the Christ], either in teaching men or in governing or bestowing any benefits on them.”[89] The Mediator Himself would be the means of instruction, the substance of the communication, and salvation itself. All divine revelation to the world, then, is to be understood in terms of the Word of God (the Son) as the word of God (the Son inscripturated), the special revelation of God, originally conveyed through oral tradition, enduringly by Scripture, ultimately in Jesus of Nazareth, and always through history and natural types.

The Mediator is, therefore, the means, such as have been necessary for salvation since the tragedy in Eden. Thus, according to Edwards, “The Word of God,” as mediatorial revelation, “was not given for any particular age, but for all ages.”[90]

Edwards delineates several reasons why God uses logocentric, word-invested means, all which revolve around the idea that, “‘Tis suitable and becoming” since the Christ is the divine Word. Which is to say, their raison d’être is both aesthetic and didactic. Since “means” are associated with the Christ in terms of His nature, that is, in terms of specially revealing God, Edwards believes that, “We can’t find them out by the light of nature, for they are such as depend on God’s arbitrary constitution.”[91] “[M]eans which God designs” are, then, an “immensely more excellent and glorious way [of religion] than by the light of nature” because they too reflect the mental/relational excellence inherent to God’s arbitrariness.[92] Therefore, “‘Tis only because’ tis God’s pleasure to annex his blessing to the means of his own appointing.. . for seeing God is the sovereign bestower of salvation he will bestow it in his own way.”[93] The particular way God has chosen to “annex his blessing” to means involves the Holy Spirit, who illuminates and impassions recipients of God’s logocentric revelatory means. Moreover, since “the sum” of what Christ “purchased” for the elect is the Holy Spirit, “means and ordinances” themselves may be seen as “conveyancers of the Spirit.”[94] A trinitarian principle governs Edwards’s theology of “means and ordinances.” God’s dealings with man are always to be understood in terms of the Son and the Spirit, and always within covenantal frameworks and strictures.

Edwards cautions, however, that though “we know that God’s manner is to bestow his grace on men by outward means. .. [a]nd, therefore, if persons are out of the way of those means, there is no likelihood of their receiving grace,” yet in and of themselves, “they have no influence to produce grace, either as causes or instruments, or any other way,” though they are “necessary in order to it.” Divine means, therefore, are necessary but not sufficient for grace, for in order to their effectiveness each Person of the Trinity must be involved, but “we know not when the Spirit’s time is.”[95]

In light of the centrality of special revelation in God’s self-glorifying scheme, Edwards’s history of the salvific status and function of the nations can be determined by the special revelation made available to them. The history of redemption unfolds a narrative with juxtaposing storylines, just like the two sides of predestination or the bilateral effects of the gospel: the one of promise, blessing, and salvation; the other of forswearing, cursing, and damnation. Both storylines, however, are developed by the theme of means availability—a sort of hermeneutic for reading history. God gives and advances special revelation in one nation to their potential benefit, while He denies or withholds further revelation from another. The key is: when the substance of a nation’s revelatory content fails to keep pace with the historical progress of redemption, the “old” revelation, for all intents and purposes, becomes redundant in terms of salvific potential and (as we shall see in the following subsection) only serves to condemn. Conversely, reception of fresh revelation elevates one’s status in the preparatory state (exposure or invitation into the covenant community) to the threshold of achievement—salvation itself.

3.a. Spiritual Judgments

Preaching on the text of Amos 8:11, Edwards asserts the doctrine: “Spiritual judgments are the most terrible that can befall a people.”[96] Special revelation is the topic at hand. According to Edwards all temporal spiritual judgments maybe reduced to these two heads: “1. A being deprived of the outward hearing of God’s word; 2. a being deprived of the inward hearing of it.” In this context “Spiritual judgment” number “1” is synonymous with the more sanitized “circumstantial unbelief.” Destitute of the means to the external call, the prospect of an effectual internal call is, according to Edwards, “doubtful. .. very improbable.”[97]

When he applies the doctrine of spiritual judgments in his work on the history of redemption, number “1” is prominent in the discussion on pre-Christian, non-Jewish nations.

The first apostasy from the revelation given to Adam and proliferated through his posterity to the “fathers of the nations” resulted in mankind’s near complete annihilation. Noah, however, preserved the former and also furthered the special revelatory knowledge of God in the next age: he receives a covenant in which Yahweh swears never to destroy the earth and all life within it because of the wickedness of man. But again declension immediately follows. So while all heathen nations came originally from those that were acquainted with the “true God and the true religion,” yet “they all by little and little degenerated into gross idolatry and ignorance of the true and became wholly destitute of the word of God excepting only the posterity of Abraham.”[98] The Semites, like the Sethites, amalgamate with the Hamites: humanity unites in a rebellion at Babel; Yahweh scatters the nations and, yet, mercifully commits His purposes and plan for man and the world to Abraham in a new and gracious covenant. The work of redemption moves forward: the nations (Gentiles) are exiled from the covenant which only Abraham and his descendants inherit.

Overlooked by McDermott, this last clause is pivotal to understanding Edwards’s pre-Advent, “preparatory period” approach to the heathen nations. At the time of the call to Abram, “true religion” was, for all intents and purposes, extinct on the earth—there was not so much as a Noah figure left once Terah died.[99] But instead of judging the earth (which Yahweh vowed not to do in His oath to Noah et al. [Gen 9:8f.]), God reveals His redemptive plan to Abram. The terms had simply changed: the oral tradition had become a covenant tradition; special covenant revelation displaced so-called “natural” religion.[100] The “exiled nations” outside of the Abrahamic Covenant would have to wait to have it brought to them through Abraham’s descendants.

Thus, the history of redemption narrows dramatically at Abram: positively, a covenant of grace is announced; negatively, head “1” stipulates that only one particular nation will possess the means by which God would administer redeeming grace. Revelation progressed and the history of redemption leapt forward. God had trumped His own oral tradition of the “protoevangelium” and transformed the Adamic promise (Gen 3:15) and Noachic oath (Gen 9:9–11) into a covenant with Abraham. Now Abraham/Israel had become a type of ark until the time of Christ—the climactic antitype.[101] The nations of the world were being judged. But instead of drowning them, God excludes them from the “ark” of the Abrahamic covenant in the same way He “shut the door of mercy” to Noah’s ark on the world’s inhabitants.[102]

The cultic system in the Hebrew nation trained them to look to God to provide a sacrifice, that is, to look to God as a merciful Savior and Redeemer, to acknowledge His holiness, majesty, and jealousy, “which,” Edwards thought, “is the exercise of the same disposition of mind as is exercised in actually believing on Christ crucified, and is the same sort of act.”[103] The Jews therefore could have a gracious disposition infused within them because they were the possessors of the means by which God covenanted to bring salvation, first to them and then to the wider world, the exiled nations. Which is to say, Israelites could be justified in the same way as the future Christian church, that is, not by obedience (which was impossible because of standing consequences and the binding power of the Adamic covenant), but in trusting God to provide and accept a sacrifice for sin and having faith that He would be a Savior to humanity and grant righteousness or, in other words, through faith in God to be faithful to His covenant promises. Thus Edwards reasoned that the two covenants were really different versions of the same covenant of grace initiated with Abraham, but having its roots in the protoevangelium.[104] Salvation then was the same as today: by grace through faith in the covenant-keeping God. (All but standard fare for covenant theology.)

The Mosaic/Sinaitic Covenant provided a “trial” not only for the Jews but the whole world as to whether they could be obedient to the revelation thus far. It too was preparatory, yet with a revelation much more refined and lucid than the ambiguous protoevangelium that was surpassed by the Abrahamic covenant.

In the covenant of grace, however, God reserves the prerogative to implement the second head of spiritual judgments:

The second sort of spiritual judgment upon a people is with respect to the inward hearing of the word of God, when there is a famine or scarcity of the good influence of the word of God upon men’s minds it is a withholding of the Spirit of God.[105]

With greater privileges and clarity come greater responsibilities and expectations. Neglect God’s means at either individual or corporate levels and spiritual judgments follow, bringing in their wake a host of tribulations. So reads Edwards’s history of national Israel. Saul slights covenant privileges and the word falls on stony ground; likewise, with Israel. As a nation it was the bearer of God’s word, but though that “word be quick and powerful, yet it is nothing; it is a dead letter without the application of the Holy Spirit.”[106] Consequently, when the next advancement in redemption history came at hand, God rendered a judgment on the Jews: their revelation became law to condemn them, and the Spirit was given to illumine the Gentiles.

The residual revelation preserved amongst infidel nations rendered them “inexcusable” for neglecting original revelation and what they currently possessed.[107] Yet, it could still serve in a preparatory sense to lead them to the Jews’ religion and the future hope for a mediatorial Messiah.[108]

The pattern continues into the First Advent and Christian period; this time, however, the second spiritual judgment receives equal emphasis with the first.

The deists inveighed against the Calvinists because only one-sixth of the world had means to the gospel, which meant that particularist theology left hell brimming with souls. They simply failed to appreciate that spiritual judgment number “1” remained in full effect. Unlike his deistic contemporaries, Edwards saw the Christian era of circumstantial unbelief both positively and negatively. Positively, their circumstantial unbelief was part and parcel of the preparatory movement of the divine drama: knowledge of new lands and peoples, though devoid of salvific means and therefore damned, only heightened millennial expectations; for Western knowledge of them soon meant their knowledge of the West’s religion, Christianity. God, in the meantime, providentially preserves and cultivates ancient residual revelation in preparation for “their more readily receiving the great doctrine of the gospel of Christ.”[109]

Hence Edwards’s optimism about the Native Americans stemmed not from their supposed possession of “saving disposition,”[110] but because the gospel was being brought to them. It was all very eschatological: they were emerging out of circumstantial unbelief, the day of grace was at hand for the barbarians, exile from the Abrahamic covenant was ending, and Christ’s millennial reign was dawning—at least from the perspective of the Housatonic River.[111]

Negatively, circumstantial unbelief could also be preparation of a more ominous sort. For example, in a MS sermon on Revelation 14:15 (c.1743) Edwards writes,

Let what has been said on this subject lead sinners to consider what they are ripening for. There are two kinds of persons that are here in this world in a preparatory state, elect and reprobates. Both are continued here in a state of preparation for an eternal state. Elect are here to be prepared [for heaven]. Reprobates are preparing [for hell]. They are ripening. And there are none [who] stand still, neither saints nor sinners.[112]

Thus, the progress of redemption (and damnation) moves on, not only at the individual level, but also with collective people groups and nations.

Just as with Israel in the Old Testament dispensation, so, too, the second spiritual judgment takes place amongst those with immediate access to the gospel.

The word of God let it be enjoyed in never so great plenty with never so great purity and dispensed with never so much faithfulness signifies nothing as to the designed effect and benefit of it without the Spirit of God. It is no purpose that the word is heard outwardly unless it be heard inwardly.[113]

To Edwards, it is a judgment proportionate to the “excellency” and availability of the light, therefore, it is the more severe: “the wrath of God is especially increased against unbelievers by that sin of unbelief. Because. .. they do in effect give God the lie.”[114] For this reason, God continues to exercise this judgment upon Islam, which, according to Edwards, with accurate knowledge of the Christian message, rejects it and “perverts” it into the religion of Satan.[115] Likewise, Roman Catholicism’s day of grace has come and gone. In Edwards’s history, Rome sold her “birthright” during the Reformation and fused the “Apostles’ gospel” with “superstition.” Consequently, God has with-held inward illumination from the minions of “popery,” to the end that it has become “Antichristian Rome. .. spiritual Babylon.”[116] And Judaism, for failing to amalgamate with its Christian successor, also has been “given over to blindness of mind and hardness of heart.”[117]

So while McDermott is correct to bring attention to the eschatological dimension of Edwards’s thought concerning “other” religions and nations, yet he departs from the substance of his sources and the spirit of Edwards’s theology by diminishing the role of logocentric means and the punitive elements allied with them, in order to play up the possibility of an Edwardsean inclusivist-soteriology. Contrary to McDermott and Morimoto, Edwards, in his evangelistic outreach to the unconverted, does not appeal to “gracious dispositions” for an exercise of faith, but rather he appeals to their self-loving disposition.[118] His motivation for doing so lies in the second head of spiritual judgments; his optimism lies in their abiding within the compass of gospel means.

IV. The Usefulness of Self-love

Edwards, of course, was not only a philosopher-theologian, but also a Puritan minister. His whole professional career, save for two short months as the president of the College of New Jersey, was spent as a pastor or gospel missionary. In that capacity he saw the dissemination of the gospel as the necessary and indispensable means of supernatural redeeming grace: “We have [no] notice given us of any restoration, any other way than by the gospel.”[119] Consequently, he held that inclusivistic and pluralistic theories were apostate theologies: “if unbelievers have anything forgiven them, then there is forgiveness out of Christ, and contrary to God’s everlasting and unalterable constitution of grace.”[120] The Mediator and His means are absolutely necessary, for all other systems of salvific hope, particularly the sentimental deistic theories, are ultimately built upon semi-Pelagian or Pelagian foundations:

What some call trusting in the ABSOLUTE MERCY OF GOD, i.e., trusting in his merciful nature without any consideration of a mediator to make way for and obtain the exercises of that mercy, is not much different from trusting in our own righteousness.[121]

Therefore, Edwards declares in the strongest particularist language:

None but those that do live under the calls of the Gospel shall be saved.. .. So there are none saved but only those that hear the calls of the Gospel. That is God’s way and his only way of bringing men to salvation, viz. by the Gospel.. .. So that all those that never have heard the joyful sound of the Gospel are excluded, as they are not chosen.[122]

But in light of the second spiritual judgment, Edwards couples this doctrine with an additional proposition: “Even of them that are called by the external call of the Gospel but few are saved.”[123] Hence Edwards found it his duty to admonish the unregenerate to “seek” and “strive,” that is, to “prepare” for salvation in the hope that they might become non-meritorious recipients of mercy. Their only hope lies in “living under the calls of the Gospel,” that is, exposure to the gospel community and, more immediately, faithful and true preaching (theatrum salutis). This had been the primary gospel strategy of the Reformation, which in Edwards’s Puritan tradition became codified through the works of William Perkins.

Contrary to Perry Miller’s proposal, the theatrum salutis is not an external environment where beliefs are formed on the basis of “sense perception” or “rhetoric of sensation.”[124] Rather, it is the means-laden “forum” in which God sovereignly dispenses saving grace in an identifiable and meaningful fashion. The minister’s objective was to lead sinners to the place where God gathers and waters His flock.

Consequently, and in spite of his doctrine of double particular election, Edwards refines a strategy of sermon rhetoric for the “Application” portion of his sermons,[125] which presses the unregenerate to autonomously “prepare” for salvation, not by advancing from one “step” to another, but through exposure to God’s forum of grace. Such thinking underscores an important distinction between Edwards’s dispositional theory of autonomous preparation and other forms of “preparation for salvation” consisting of either (i) the ability of the sinner to independently prepare him/herself by gradual and definite advancements toward the threshold of conversion,[126] or (ii) the Roman Catholic expressions of cooperative preparation for grace,[127] or, especially, (iii) the sinner being “prepared” from first to last by God—a heteronomous preparation—which itself is an “if/then” scenario: if God prepares, then it proves effectual.[128] In contrast to this latter scenario, Edwards’s autonomous preparation by the sinner should not be considered divine preparation at all. In Edwards’s scheme, the sinner merely “seeks” divine help—and sinfully at that. Hence it would be better to call Edwards’s scheme a doctrine of “seeking” rather than “preparing for salvation”: “seeking” is done by the sinner, who one presupposes “seeks” and “strives” without the soul-transforming assistance of the Spirit. Though, to be sure, the Spirit may “in an extraordinary manner” heighten the natural sensibilities of the unregenerate to previously unattained levels.[129] Divine (or heteronomous or compositional) preparation, however, is only truly verified in retrospect, that is, after the sinner experiences salvation—when the seeking or striving activities may then be credited to the availing monergistic work of the Spirit. This Edwards analyzes into minutiae, tracing the “distinguishing marks” of those under divine convictions, humiliation, etc., in Religious Affections and Distinguishing Marks.[130] Of this doctrine of heteronomous preparation, Edwards finds objectivity or verification for articulating this idea as a biblical doctrine in his philosophy of history. Only God’s preparing could result in salvation: sinful seeking is in no way a personal turning to God. To espouse anything other only blurs the line between a synergistic salvation model and a monergistic model, between Arminian evangelism and Calvinistic effectual calling.

The call for the unregenerate to “seek salvation” in their own strength and out of selfish motives could be found not only in Stoddard’s Treatise Concerning Conversion (Boston, 1719) and The Efficacy of the Fear of Hell (Boston, 1713), but also Thomas Shepard’s famous Parable of the Ten Virgins (1660) and Thomas Hooker’s disputed The Soul’s Preparation for Christ (1632), to name but a few.[131] In this respect Edwards may be seen simply to follow in the steps of Perkins, Sibbes, Shepard, and Stoddard. Yet Edwards did have something innovative to offer when he ensured the method by founding it, in large part, upon principles stemming from his dispositional ontology. And this is where Morimoto and McDermott entirely misunderstand Edwards. Edwards did not optimistically exhort the unconverted to engage means because their disposition would issue in a faith-act. Instead, true to his philosophical-anthropology, he appeals to their inordinate self-love precisely because it would not issue in a faith-act, but it might move them out of fear and self-loving self-preservation to “live under the calls of the Gospel,” where haply regenerating grace could supernaturally work a saving faith-act, according to God’s (covenant bound) arbitrary will.[132]

Edwards proposes in Religious Affections that, in addition to reasonably engaging the rational mind through the word of God, the Christian minister must also appeal to natural-man’s innate operating principles, to the very structure of his being, that is, to man’s “inordinate” self-love and its “less noble” principles of fear, self-preservation, and self-interest. For, according to Edwards, only two things will move the whole will (rational will and appetites) of man, namely, fear and love.

There are no other principles, which human nature is under the influence of, that will ever make men conscientious, but one of these two, fear and love.. . .[133]

His answer to the problem of exposing unregenerates to God’s forum of salvation is to appeal to natural-man’s love for himself, to his dispositional nature. What will move the will of the unregenerate man is his inordinate, sinfully selfish concern for himself. Fear of pain and punishment and the plague of guilt and death will move a man. Natural-man’s interest in preserving his own life will motivate him to hear the gospel, not because he loves either it or its Author, but because he inordinately loves himself above all things, and needs it to preserve himself. This shallow self-loving concern to preserve one’s self and serve one’s interest, Edwards explains, is enough at least to move the sinner into the forum of salvation in which hope and (ideally) salvation may be found.[134] The logic of disposition was applicable to evangelism, too.

This type of “seeking” of itself never issues in salvation; neither is it traceable nor meritorious. In this sense, preparation should not be thought of in terms of moving from one step or stage to another, but rather as a status. If one mentally engages the logocentric means (which almost certainly effect some sort of non-meritorious moral reformation, while eliciting natural “affections”), then one is in a state of preparedness. Again, there is no gradual movement toward conversion, there is only the possibility of being converted by the Spirit if one retains “the seed of the word”—the Christ-”material” used by the Spirit to effect conversion. The matter finds rhetorical expression in terms of probability quotients: the more “material” one imbibes and the more consistent the engagement within the theatrum salutis, the greater the “possibility” of conversion:

The oftener these notions or ideas [of God’s grace in the gospel] are revived, and the more they are upheld in the soul, the greater the opportunity for the Spirit of God to infuse grace, because he hath more opportunity, hath opportunity more constantly. The more constantly the matter for grace to work upon is upheld, the more likely are persons to receive grace of the Spirit. ‘Tis the wisest way to maintain the opportunity, for we know not when the Spirit’s time is.[135]

Content and consistency are, therefore, the key to preparatory seeking, not stages. And even then all that Edwards can offer is the “possibility” of salvation: preparatory seeking comes with no promises. Consequently, in his promotion of the “possibility” of gospel benefits to selfish natural-man exposed to the Word, Edwards sometimes fashions his “Exhortations” similar to Pascal’s “Wager.”[136]

Spiritual judgment number “2” was, for Edwards, commonplace in revival-scorning, religiously declining England and, to an increasing degree, New England. So he would preach, “Some men, whatsoever means and advantages they have, and how much soever the work of conversion is carried on, will never be converted.”[137] The reasons for this are not just theological but dispositional:

I would shew what men cannot do in order to their salvation and in general men can do no part of the work of salvation. Whatsoever is properly any part of salvation is beyond their power—whether it be the imputation of their salvation by satisfaction for sin or purchasing salvation or whether it be the application of salvation in conversion, sanctification, and glorification. 

The salvation of a sinner from the foundation to the top stone is the work of God. Every part of it is altogether beyond the power of a natural man. Men can do nothing towards saving themselves: 

1. Men can’t make any atonement for their sins. . . 

2. They can’t purchase heaven. . . 

3. They can’t convert themselves. .. And they can’t work a gracious disposition into themselves; so they can’t put forth any gracious act. The least act of grace is infinitely beyond their reach and out of their power. 

4. They can’t oblige or dispose God to give them conversion. . . 

5. They can’t do anything to fit themselves for Christ’s acceptance. . . 

6. They have no power to do any thing to entitle themselves to any promise.. . .[138]

Hence, “owning to their want of disposition,” the only hope for individuals, as well as their communities (which, if declension continued, could suffer the harsher spiritual judgment of apostasy), is to maintain “the diligent and constant attendance” on all means.

According to Edwards’s ontology, natural-man can at least “abide” as an auditor of God’s word out of self-preservation, fear, and self-regard—active manifestations of the self-love disposition. Corresponding with God’s communication to them “according to their nature and capacity” Edwards advocates unregenerate seeking from “an aversion to pain and desire of pleasure,” though, to be sure, “it is in no wise from a good principle.”[139]

Edwards’s appeal to the “less noble” principles of self-love, namely, fear, self-preservation, and self-interest in his evangelistic approach to the unregenerate serves his Calvinist scheme well. First, it preserves the sovereignty of God in the dispensing of salvation. Second, it retains the use and priority of the ordained means of salvation, namely, the word of God and preaching. And third, it approaches natural-man in accordance with the denunciatory pronouncements of Calvinism’s anthropological assessment—man is spiritually dead in his sins and therefore morally and meritoriously unable to do anything cooperative toward salvation and, least of all, true worship.

Edwards’s thoughts on preparation, like so many things, were affected by the way he attempted to convey the idea of God’s direct interaction with the world. As he rehearses God’s work of redemption “from the fall of man to the end of the world,” we find that the natural-man and reprobate function, both at individual and collective levels, in a way that parallels repetitive stages in the work of redemption’s constitutive history.[140] Just as the historia salutis develops along the lines of preparation, achievement, and application, so too the individual life is a microcosm of this work.

The heathen nations also take part collectively in the grand scheme of redemption history. Their knowledge of certain religious truths serves to prepare former reprobate nations for the application of regenerating grace. Conversely, their present rejection of the Messiah accounts for Edwards’s negative theological assessment, as he holds the natural-man fully culpable for failing in his moral and epistemic responsibilities. Their place in redemption history is then twofold: to further the work of redemption for future generations and to replicate the punitive aspects of God’s inner actuality (which also serves as a warning to others and exhibits the justice of God in the process). Edwards’s interest in non-Christian religions was, therefore, part of his spiritual mapping or tracing of God’s movements toward redemption history’s consummate end in Christ.

V. Concluding Remarks

5.a. The Revealed God

By constructing a science of history as an apologetic device, where universal history is used as an attempt “to relate the sum of all God’s works in providence,” Edwards engages in the new production of a standardized and universally accessible type of religious knowledge. He purposely applies abstract theological and philosophical principles to every conceivable concrete, historical situation in order to make the ethereal—spiritual realities—conceptually tangible for all, in all time. That is, by means of a redemption narrative, Edwards translates his theocentric vision of reality and makes it concrete, accessible, and meaningful. The God of Edwards is, therefore, no deus absconditus.

Because all participate in history and are subject to time, all have some point of contact with God’s orchestration of the progress of redemption (some to their eternal benefit, others not), “to accomplish the glory of the blessed Trinity in an exceeding degree.”[141] Consequently, all possess inherent value. The history of redemption is then the laboratory for examining true religion’s interactions with surrounding peoples and cultures. Whether believer or unbeliever, the friend of the Christian religion or antagonist, all may read God’s intentions in the mundane and remarkable accounts of history up to the present and, with the aid of scriptural prophecies, beyond the present.

In accord with his teaching in other places, Edwards asserts that elements of God’s revealed glory may be known to the unregenerate, even the most deluded deist, simply by surveying history. But to know the truth of it, one must interpret it through the filter of redemption theology, which Edwards eagerly supplies.

The full, spiritual glory, however, remains known and sensible to the regenerate only.

Edwards’s evangelistic strategy of contextualizing the individual’s existence historically rests heavily upon the time-honored principle that the acquisition of knowledge cannot be dissociated from the training of minds. The effects of the Awakenings and other social and religious changes prompted Edwards’s teaching the minds of Northampton and New England, Calvinists and deists, believer and unbeliever alike, to view all time as pregnant with eternal implications and spiritual significance. This point is pressed upon his auditors and readers, to view time and history as Edwards specifies, lest they perish through the delusion of a merely ethical, that is to say, deistic view of time and space.

In the “Redemption Discourse,” Edwards shows us where his theological investigations for a methodology have climaxed. It was upon the foundation of the Trinitarian pactum salutis for self-glorification, identifiable by the triadic preparation-achievement-realization pattern, that Edwards would refine his theology for the remaining years of his life. “Miscellanies” No. 1062 and the “Essay on the Trinity” exemplify the continuance of this method, which was to have found complete expression in the magnum opus, prevented only by his death.[142]

The decisive significance of his interpretation of redemption from the whole to the particular shows his appreciation of the nature of human existence as inevitably historical, subjacent, and dependent upon sovereign divine dispensations. Immediately after his atypical conversion and early into his ministerial career he struggled with traditional Puritan preparationism as an element only being interpreted within the whole.[143] This raised long-term pastoral concerns for Edwards. Preparation was confined to the subjective appropriation of redemption. Certainly pastoral psychology was a significant factor in understanding the process, but the outworkings of redemption could not be founded upon such theologically and philosophically inept premises. Preparation was not an objective principle beyond its inclusion within the individual morphological pattern of conversion, which was taught from the Scriptures by his Puritan forefathers—something Edwards seriously questioned for a time. Now, however, he finds the reality and authenticity for the conversion model not only in Scripture, but also in the necessity and pattern of redemption history (from the perspective of the present), and the reasonableness (according to the “fitness”) of divine ordering. Consequently, he does not believe he is artificially employing or superimposing the preparation-achievement-realization model onto the individual conversion scheme. Rather, he is convinced that he has found the objective foundation of the preparationist scheme that legitimizes and requires its usage through his analysis of the eternal Trinitarian confederation, the revelation of Scripture, and the patterns and continuity of redemption history.

5.b. A kinder, gentler Jonathan Edwards

McDermott and Morimoto repeatedly attempt to convince their readers that Edwards—supposedly so troubled by deistic complaints that the supralapsarian God is capricious and cruel—followed Turretin and Mastricht in an infralapsarian approach to soteriology so that he might soften the harsh realities of determinism, or at least explore the possibilities of inclusivism.[144] Unfounded as this may be, both scholars fail to note the larger point that the ordo salutis within Edwards’s theocentric system is itself a product of the pactum salutis and its “hyper-supralapsarian” proposals. God gets His glory: salvation/damnation are His methods; election/reprobation are His means; the Son and Spirit are its sum.[145]

Despite their scholarly efforts, “The Edwards of the Possible” proposed by Morimoto and McDermott bears little resemblance to the eighteenth-century figure displaced from his pastoral charge for, among other things, restricting access to the sacraments and publicly upbraiding children of prominent church wardens for their unregenerate behavior. Instead of conducting himself like John McLeod Campbell, who, for the accommodating benefit of his parishioners, began to reassess confessional substitutionary soteriology in terms of a universalistic work of supererogation by Jesus Christ, Edwards underwent the rejection of his ministerial charge partly because of his increasingly restrictivistic opinions concerning the scope of the covenant and its associated privileges. Plainly, Edwards neither desired nor was in need of an inclusivist or Universalist scheme. Indeed, he was convinced that the resolute defense and espousal of particularism was in fact the defense and espousal of unalterable divine truth.[146]

For Edwards, adherence to true biblical theology and an authentic Christian worldview included submitting one’s self to the fact that God promotes that glory in two ways: redemption and damnation.

Over a century later, W. G. T. Shedd and other Northern Presbyterians gained fame for their articulation of a virtual, saving faith, but not Edwards. While Shedd and others believed in a “larger hope” outside of gospel proclamation, Edwards did not.[147] For Edwards, the heathen world beyond the compass of gospel means “is like a sinking ship.”[148] He was part of an earlier orthodox tradition not embarrassed about the confessional doctrines that say that those who die unevangelized or unconverted are destined to eternal damnation.[149] He did not attempt to lay out a new paradigm to suggest anything otherwise. Instead, he attempted to buttress theoretically his own restrictivist tradition—amidst an Enlightenment assault on his own confessional tradition—through philosophical considerations of the aesthetic dimension/potential of double particular predestination and eternal damnation.

Notes

1. See Mark A. Noll, “Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Theology,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 260–87.
2. “To the Reverend John Erskine,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 16, Letters and Personal Writings (ed. George S. Claghorn; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 16:355. (Initial references to the Yale series volumes will include a full bibliographical citation; subsequent references to works in those volumes will thereafter be designated Yale-Works.) See Edwards’s enthusiastic approval of the tenets of the Massachusetts “Association Covenant,” a society of both clergy and laity who bound themselves to “see to it that we be sound and clear in the great doctrines of the gospel, which are the life of our holy religion (we here intend those doctrines which are exhibited in our excellent Westminster Catechism and Confession of Faith); and that we all boldly and impartially appear in the defense thereof.. .. That we manifest our approbation of the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism, as containing an excellent system of divinity: and we purpose to preach agreeable to the doctrines of the Bible exhibited therein” (“To the Reverend James Robe,” Yale-Works, 16:277, 279).
3. Edwards, “Preface,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 1, Freedom of the Will (ed. Paul Ramsey; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 131.
4. Holmes, “Jonathan Edwards,” International Review XI (1880): 125.
5. Jonathan Edwards, Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption (ed. Egbert C. Smyth; New York, 1880). See also Edwards, An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity (ed. George P. Fisher; New York: Scribner, 1903).
6. For further discussion see, Edwards A. Park, “Remarks of Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity,” BSac XXXVIII (April 1881): 367ff.; Bruce M. Stephens, “The Doctrine of the Trinity from Jonathan Edwards to Horace Bushnell: A Study on the Eternal Sonship of Christ” (Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1970); and Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
7. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144.
8. McDermott, “Response to Gilbert: “The Nations Will Worship: Jonathan Edwards and the Salvation of the Heathen,’” TJ NS 23 (2002): 79-80.
9. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 134.
10. Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
11. McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newmann and non-Christian Religions,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian (ed. Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), 129–30.
12. John F. Wilson states that Edwards displayed “an incipient universalism” in the outworkings of his theory of redemptive history (“Editor’s Introduction,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 9, A History of the Work of Redemption [ed. John F. Wilson; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 89). Wilson’s suggestion (legitimated by Thomas A. Schafer’s article, “Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith,” CH20 [1951]: 55-67, which suggested that Edwards’s soteriology facilitated inclusivism) initiates the contemporary discussion of Edwards’s supposed inclusivistic/universalistic propensities and theologizing.
13. See John J. Bombaro, “The Formulation of Jonathan Edwards’ Metaphysics,” The Clarion Review (January 2004): 8-19, and “Divine Comprehensiveness and Edwardsean Panentheism,” The Clarion Review (forthcoming July 2004), where the philosophical underpinnings of McDermott and Morimoto’s dispositional soteriology, namely, Sang Hyun Lee’s thesis of an Edwardsean dispositional ontology, receives a critical assessment. See also Stephen R. Holmes, “Does Jonathan Edwards Use a Dispositional Ontology? A Response to Sang Hyun Lee,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, 99–114.
14. See John J. Bombaro, “Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Salvation,” WTJ 65 (2003): 45-67, in which Morimoto’s thesis undergoes an analytical evaluation.
15. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 3. See also McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newmann and non-Christian Religions,” 129–30.
16. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 92.
17. See John J. Bombaro, “Beautiful Beings: The Function of the Reprobate in the Philosophical-Theology of Jonathan Edwards” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2001).
18. See also Greg D. Gilbert, “The Nations Will Worship: Jonathan Edwards and the Salvation of the Heathen,” TJ NS 23 (2002): 53-76. To be sure, McDermott acknowledges that Edwards “never reached this explicit conclusion [of inclusivism], at least in his published writings or private notebooks.” This is to say, Edwards never consciously professed or espoused inclusivism as such. However, McDermott unmistakably concludes that Edwards’s private notebooks reveal a distinct movement toward inclusivism: “Edwards’s soteriology resembles Roman Catholic theology in ways that make it easier for him to consider the salvation of the heathen. .. his own theology lays the groundwork for such an interpretation” (Confronts the Gods, 137). “While he made some cryptic remarks in the Miscellanies about how the heathen might use religious truth for the good of ‘their own souls’ (Misc. 1162), these concessions were largely limited to his private notebooks; in his published treatises and sermons, ‘heathen’ was usually a synonym for ‘damned.’ Yet the extensive use he made of the prisca theologia, the advances he made in typology, and his development of a dispositional soteriology prepared the theological way—for whatever use he or others might later have used them—for more expansive views of truth in the religions and salvation for religious others” (“Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newmann and non-Christian Religions,” 130).
19. See McDermott, Confronts the Gods, passim; and “Response to Gilbert,” 77–80. Seven (of ten) MS “Miscellanies” notebooks (nos. 4, 5, 7, 8, 9[a], 9[b], and 9[c]) from Edwards’s corpus contain literally hundreds of folio pages of notes on non-Christian religions and “HEATHEN PHILOSOPHERS.” Perhaps the first entry specifically designated to this genre is “Miscellanies” No. 953 (c. 1742), while the last “Miscellanies” No. 1359 was composed shortly before the commencement of his presidency at Princeton (Jan. 1758) and death (Mar. 1758).
20. “To the Trustees of the College of New Jersey,” Yale-Works, 16:727. This unfinished treatise is not to be confused with the thirty-sermon series posthumously published in 1774 with the same name (repr. in Yale-Works, vol. 9).
21. Edwards refers to Tindal in “Miscellanies” No. 1337 and cites Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (London, 1730) in “Miscellanies” No. 1340, and Edwards certainly alludes to him whenever on the issue of “deistical religion.” Chubb, of course, is a key polemical target in Edwards’s magisterial treatise, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into The modern prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will (Boston, 1754).
22. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 18–19.
23. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Peter H. Nidditch; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), bk. IV, 18, 6. In The Reasonableness of Christianity As Delivered in the Scriptures (London, 1695), Locke furthers the thesis that revealed religion must be subjected to the judgment of reason. Moreover, in his Letters Concerning Toleration (London, 1689/92), Locke attempted to embed historical revelation and the proof of its reasonableness in the general system of rationality.
24. Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms (Norwich and London, 1703), 74–77. See also McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 22.
25. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 51.
26. Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 8, Ethical Writings (ed. Paul Ramsey; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 541.
27. Ramsey, “Editor’s Introduction,” Yale-Works, 1:69.
28. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 33.
29. Freedom of the Will also had the aim to buttress the Calvinist theory of reprobation, as the conclusion suggests.
30. See Edwards, Yale-Works, 8:437; and “Miscellanies” No. 332, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 13, The “Miscellanies,” a-500 (ed. Thomas A. Schafer; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 410.
31. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 43.
32. See Michael J. McClymond’s intriguing essay “If There Had Been No Vaccination: Some Conjecturing Concerning the Character of Edwards’s Unwritten Magnum Opus” (paper presented at the conference, “Jonathan Edwards in Historical Memory,” University of Miami, March 2000). In it McClymond suggests that the evidence in Edwards’s letters links the unwritten project to such works as A History of the Work of Redemption (1774), A Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World, and the “Miscellanies.” Though the proposed treatise bears the same name as the published 1739 sermon series, it was not to be the same sort of “history,” but a body of divinity “thrown into the form of an history.. . in an entire [sic] new method,” i.e., the traditional content of Protestant theology chronologically developed in conjunction with sacred and profane history (Yale-Works, 16:727). See Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work’: Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and ‘The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments,’” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (ed. Stephen J. Stein; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 52–65; and Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 310.
33. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 38–39.
34. Ibid., 44.
35. Ibid., 41.
36. See Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 1020, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 20, The “Miscellanies,” 833–1152 (ed. Amy Plantinga Pauw; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 351.
37. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 959, Yale-Works, 20:239.
38. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 43.
39. See Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 48–104.
40. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 103.
41. On the whole, Edwards was without recourse to verify the historical accuracy of his sources concerning non-Christian religions, many which were flawed. And so, he took them as practically reliable. More accessible, however, were the ancient classics texts at Harvard and Yale. But it seems Edwards was little interested in devoting time to confirm the (at times, incorrect) claims of Gale, Grotius, Cudworth, Chevalier Ramsey, Samuel Bochart, and others, whom he cited regarding pagan wisdom and mythology. His motives were not those of a historiographer but of a theologian. Thus, he was source-sensitive only in terms of the didactic potential of a historical text’s content.
42. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 103.
43. For Edwards’s comparisons between the Triune God and ideas of the divine as found in Plato, Aristotle, the Pythagoreans, Neo-Platonism, and Plotinus, see “Miscellanies” Nos. 955, 970, and 992, Yale-Works, 20:227–29, 253–54, 321–23.
44. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 88. See MS sermon on Amos 8:11 (1729) (The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University). (With respect to Edwards’s sermons, the date within parenthesis denotes the year composed and preached, or when multiple dates appear, preached and repreached. All cited MS sermons are located in The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.)
45. “Miscellanies” No. 23, Yale-Works, 13:287.
46. “Sermon Twenty-One,” Yale-Works, 9:400.
47. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 104–05.
48. McDermott, “Response to Gilbert,” 80.
49. “Miscellanies” No. 986, Yale-Works, 20:309–11.
50. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 89, 133–34.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 136.
53. Ibid., 136, 138.
54. Edwards collated materials about non-Christian religions and pagan philosophers from a variety of sources including dictionaries, encyclopedias, travelogues, monographs, newspaper articles, and tangentially referential sources (such as sermons). Peter Thueson’s (ed.) forthcoming The “Catalogue” (vol. 27 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards; New Haven: Yale University Press) and the individual “Miscellanies” entries, in which various passages from the aforementioned sources were copied, cite both references and the sources Edwards desired to procure. See “Edwards’s Reading ‘Catalogue’” at Yale Divinity School or, alternatively, John H. Gerstner’s select bibliography of Edwards’s reading in The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (3 vols.; Powhatan, Va.: Berea Publications, 1993), 3:605–63; or McDermott’s citation of a number of sources in Confronts the Gods, 92–94.
55. McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 139–40.
56. Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (58 vols.; Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883—), 1:225.
57. MS sermons on Rev 3:15 (c.1733) and Matt 7:13–14 (1751).
58. Published as “Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and Intolerable,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (ed. Edward Hickman; 2 vols.; London, 1834; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974]), 2:78f. Hereafter, Banner-Works.
59. Of the approximately 345 sermons preached between 1751 and January 1758, more than half (approximately 54 percent or 183) were re-preached sermons with an original composition prior to 1750. Moreover, the majority of these re-preached sermons are from 1741 and earlier.
60. See Fiering, Moral Thought, 105, 203, 208–9, and 238–39.
61. Ava Chamberlain rightly argues that not only did Edwards lend volumes of his “Miscellanies” to his protégés and colleagues (e.g., Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy) but also “various features of the ‘Miscellanies’ manuscripts lend them a public character.” Chamberlain points out that Edwards composed the “Miscellanies” in complete sentences, “first writing rough drafts that he would later carefully edit and transcribe—using his ‘public’ hand—into the notebooks. .. He even elaborately structured the longer entries” (“Editor’s Introduction,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 18, The “Miscellanies” 501–832 [ed. Ava Chamberlain; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000], 9). Both Ava Chamberlain and Thomas A. Schafer conclude that Edwards employed his “faire” hand in the “Miscellanies” precisely because he had an eye to their eventual publication. What is more, scores of “Miscellanies” reappear, many with little to no alteration whatsoever, in a host of his published treatises.
62. Brine, “Of the Defects which attended the Doctrine of Morality, as taught by Philosophers and Poets,” in A Treatise on Various Subjects (London, 1750), ch. 3. See also “Miscellanies” No. 1162 (The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University).
63. See the excerpt from “Miscellanies” No. 1334 in Banner-Works, 2:492f.
64. I.e., in Andover copy of “Miscellanies” notebook no. 6, p. 455 (Trask Library, Andover Newton Theological Seminary).
65. Thomas A. Schafer translation (The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University). See Edwards’s discussion in Freedom of the Will, Pt. III: “Freedom and Responsibility,” §5: “Sincerity, No Excuse”: “Hence it follows, there is nothing that appears in the reason and nature of things, which can justly lead us to determine, that God will certainly give the necessary means of salvation, or some way or other bestow true holiness and eternal life on those heathen, who are sincere. .. in their endeavors to find out the will of the deity, and to please him, according to their light, that they may escape his future displeasure and wrath, and obtain happiness in their future state, through his favor” (Yale-Works, 1:319).
66. See Fiering, “Hell and the Humanitarians,” in Moral Thought, 200–260.
67. To be sure, Edwards acknowledges that his “discourse on virtue is principally designed against that notion of virtue maintained by My Lord Shaftesbury, [Francis] Hutcheson, and [George] Turnbull,” but he gives this statement in conjunction with his purposes for writing a defense of the doctrine of original sin against John Taylor’s The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin, as well as Freedom of the Will. Edwards linked both the treatise on Original Sin and Two Dissertations, along with Freedom of the Will, as I have argued above, with “the modern opinions which prevail concerning these two things [viz., God’s End in Creating the World and The Mature of True Virtue], [which] stand very much as foundations of that fashionable scheme of divinity, which seems to have become almost universal,” namely the naturalized religion of deism (“To the Reverend Thomas Foxcroft,” in Yale-Works, 16:696).
68. See Edwards, “Scripture” Nos. 138a, 232, and 236 in Yale-Works, vol. 15; and his MS sermon on Isa 27:13 (1741).
69. See Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, in Yale-Works, 8:310; and “Miscellanies” Nos. 965 and 979, in Yale-Works, 20:249, 291–96.
70. MS sermon on Matt 7:13–14 (1751). Edwards’s most sustained defense of hell was written in 1755 in “Miscellanies” Nos. 1348 and 1356.
71. The ministerial setting of the Redemption Discourse is presented by Ola E. Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758 (New York: Collier Books, 1961), ch. 8; and Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980). Edwards also refers to this work and the future project of its expansion into his magnum opus as the “Redemption Discourse” and the “Work of Redemption.” In the following discussion I shall do likewise.
72. See Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Yale-Works, 9:1–14.
73. Ibid., 9:2–5.
74. See Holmes, God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); and Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All.
75. See Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor, 125–30.
76. Wilson H. Kimnach, “General Introduction,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 10, Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723 (ed. Wilson H. Kimnach; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 103.
77. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 702, in Yale-Works, 18:296. See also “Sermon One,” A History of the Work of Redemption, in Yale-Works, 9:113–26.
78. Edwards, “Sermon Two,” in Yale-Works, 9:127.
79. Edwards, “Sermon One,” in Yale-Works, 9:117.
80. Edwards, “Sermon Eighteen,” in Yale-Works, 9:344.
81. Edwards, “Sermon Five,” in Yale-Works, 9:177.
82. See Concerning the End for which God Created the World, in Yale-Works, 8:405ff.
83. Edwards, “Sermon Five,” in Yale-Works, 9:177–80.
84. Edwards, “Sermon Two,” in Yale-Works, 9:128.
85. Edwards’s analytic reasoning bears little resemblance to the triadic movement of Hegel’s dialectic process.
86. See Edwards, Yale-Works, 9:160–65, 169, 215, 525.
87. Edwards, “Sermon Two,” in Yale-Works, 9:127.
88. Edwards, “Miscellanies” Nos. 1162 and 1357 (The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University Library). See also Fiering, Moral Thought, 108.
89. Edwards, Yale-Works, 9:131. The late 1730s saw a flurry of “Miscellanies” entries on “MEDIATION OF CHRIST” and “MEDIATOR, why the second person of the Trinity” (“Table to the ‘Miscellanies,’” in Yale-Works, 13:140). See for example, “Miscellanies” Nos. 539, 594, 622, 733, 737, 764a, 772, 773, and 781, in Yale-Works, 18.
90. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 583, in Yale-Works, 18:119.
91. Edwards, MS sermon on Ezek 33:4–5 (1735/6).
92. Edwards, MS sermon on Isa 5:4 (1734, 1757).
93. Edwards, MS sermon on Ezek 33:4–5 (1735/6).
94. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 689, in Yale-Works, 18:253.
95. Edwards, “Miscellanies” Nos. 538, 539, in Yale-Works, 18:83–84, 86–87.
96. Edwards, MS sermon (1729, n.d.). According to Kimnach the MS bears marks which indicate that it was re-preached.
97. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 1299 (Thomas A. Schafer’s transcription, The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University).
98. Edwards, MS sermon on Amos 8:11 (1729). Emphasis mine.
99. Edwards, “Sermon Four,” in Yale-Works, 9:158–59, 165–66.
100. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 598, in Yale-Works, 18:140.
101. Edwards, “Sermon Three,” in Yale-Works, 9:152.
102. Edwards, MS sermon on Matt 25:10 (1742, 1756): “doctrine”: “The shutting of the door of mercy,” 1.
103. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 326, in Yale-Works, 13:406.
104. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 1354 (Thomas A. Schafer’s transcription, The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University); also “Sermon Twenty-Five,” in Yale-Works, 9:449–50, 525.
105. Edwards, MS sermon on Amos 8:11 (1729).
106. Edwards, Yale-Works, 10:543.
107. Although Puritans such as Richard Baxter, Philip Doddridge, Cotton Mather, and Isaac Watts (all of whom McDermott cites) acknowledged that a scant few among the “heathen” were saved, Edwards never explicitly or implicitly agrees. Rather, even in his most sanguine moments, he refuses to offer more hope for them than, “there is no likelihood in their receiving grace” (Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 538, in Yale-Works, 18:84).
108. Edwards, “Sermon Two,” in Yale-Works, 9:137.
109. Ibid.
110. McDermott, in his chapter “American Indians” (ch. 11), repeatedly emphasizes Edwards’s rather innocuous use of “inclination” and “disposition” in connection with Native Americans to suggest something ontological, and therefore makes a rather artificial connection with the soteriology articulated in Religious Affections (Yale-Works, vol. 2). He ignores the fact that, on some occasions (such as with Indian interests “to be instructed in the Christian religion” [Yale-Works, 9:434]), these words may not have any dispositional soteriological connection. See McDermott, Confronts the Gods, 198–99.
111. Edwards believed that at least two thousand years would elapse before the parousia (“Miscellanies” Nos. 1198, 1199 [Thomas A. Schafer’s transcription, The Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University]). His enthusiasm about the Indians relates to a sense of confirmation: he understood the ingathering of barbarous nations as a precursor to Jesus Christ’s return.
112. Edwards, MS sermon on Matt 7:13–14(1750/1): “doctrine”: “All mankind of all nations.. . are going in one or the other of these paths, either in the way that leads to life or the way that leads to destruction,” 1.
113. Edwards, MS sermon on Amos 8:11 (1729).
114. Edwards, MS sermon on John 3:36(b) (1734, 1755). See also his “Sermon Twenty-Eight,” in Yale-Works, 9:489–90.
115. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 613, in Yale-Works, 18:145–46; Banner-Works, 2:488.
116. Edwards, “Sermon Twenty,” in Yale-Works, 9:374.
117. Edwards, Types of the Messiah, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 11, Typological Writings (ed. Wallace E. Anderson and Mason I. Lowance, Jr., with David Watters; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 322 n. 5.
118. See Bombaro, “Beautiful Beings,” ch. 3.
119. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 596, in Yale-Works, 18:130.
120. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 648, in Yale-Works, 18:186.
121. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 648, in Yale-Works, 18:188.
122. Edwards, MS sermon on Matt 22:14 (1732).
123. Ibid.
124. See Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” HTR 41 (1948): 127-28.
125. Here the influence of Timothy Edwards and Solomon Stoddard is noteworthy. Both pro vided homiletical models for Edwards to follow, and in that respect he offers nothing new, though his compositional artistry was of a superior nature. “In effect, then, the Application is a period of experience for Edwards’ auditory, a time of living imaginatively, through a ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ a series of fictive experiences created and controlled by the artist-preacher” (Kimnach, “The Literary Techniques of Jonathan Edwards,” in Yale-Works, 10:50). “Application” is synonymous with “Exhortation” or “Use of Instr[uction].” In the midst of and subsequent to the periods of revival in 1734/5 and 1740–42, it was not uncommon for “Applications” to find their way into the “Doctrine” segment. “Doctrine” and “Improvement” became mixed modes when “seeking” and “trusting God” were explicated.
126. One might term this “Arminian” preparationism (see Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], 125–29).
127. Phillip Schaff, “The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent,” in The Creeds of Christendom (3 vols.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878), 2:92–94.
128. William Perkins, for example, underscores the difference between what I am calling “autonomous” preparation and “heteronomous” preparation when he distinguished the beginnings of preparation and the beginnings of composition: “Beginnings of preparation arise from the work of the Law and are not necessarily works of God’s Spirit” which are “the effect of regeneration begun” (Perkins, The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. William Perkins [3 vols.; London, 1612, 1613, 1631], 1:638–41; 2:13). Heteronomous preparation is equivalent to irresistible grace and, therefore, rejected by Arminian theology, which asserted individual “free assent.”
129. See Part II of Edwards, Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 2, Religious Affections (ed. John E. Smith; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 127–90.
130. See Mark Valeri’s analysis: “Evangelical Humiliation as Preparation for Conversion” in “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 17, Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733 (ed. Mark Valeri; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 36–40; and Smith, “Editor’s Introduction,” Yale-Works, 2:8–43.
131. Their collective position, which made provision for natural-man’s affective nature, stands opposite to John Cotton’s extreme negation of such a notion (see Pettit, The Heart Prepared, 129–57).
132. Edwards, Yale-Works, 2:108. See also Fiering, Moral Thought, 171. Hence the basic argument of Freedom of the Will: the “will” does not constitute a real entity but is an expression of the strongest motive in a person’s character.
133. Edwards, Yale-Works, 2:179.
134. Edwards, MS sermon on Prov 9:12 (1738, 1751); MS sermon on 1 Pet 1:13 (1732).
135. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 539, in Yale-Works, 18:86–87.
136. See, e.g., his MS sermons on Eccl 9:10 (1733/4) and Ezek 33:4–5 (1734/5).
137. Edwards, MS sermon on Ezek 47:11 (1734).
138. Edwards, MS sermon on Ezek 33:4–5 (1735/6).
139. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 631, in Yale-Works, 18:158–59.
140. Edwards, “Sermon One,” in Yale-Works, 9:116.
141. Edwards, Yale-Works, 9:125.
142. William J. Scheick, however, does not read Edwards’s History in this way. In his article, “The Grand Design: Jonathan Edwards’ History of the Work of Redemption” Eighteenth Century Studies 8 [1975]: 300-314), instead of viewing Edwards’s methodology in the series from the whole (pactum salutis) to the particular (the redemption of individual saints), Scheick believes Edwards, captive to the Puritan psychologized morphology of conversion model, projects the subjective dimension of conversion’s application onto the collective Work of Redemption. The scheme works in reverse, from the minute to the grand, and is supposedly what Edwards intended by “a body of divinity in an entire new method” (Yale-Works, 16:727). Contrary to Scheick’s opinion, Edwards employs the analogy opposite to many of his Puritan fathers, precisely because he was acutely aware of the distinction between the subjective side of redemption and the objective side (see Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Yale-Works, 9:100). Edwards worked toward the realization of this project by drafting an outline, compiling notes, collecting materials, and revising portions of the Redemption Discourse in his private notebooks. The threefold categorization of the historia salutis was to be retained and expanded. As sermon notebook “45” (e.g., pp. 9, 14, 41) and “Notebook 10” (e.g., proposed chapter four within “Notebook 10” [as part of a three-notebook series, 10, 25, and 2, devoted to the History project] was to address the issue of “preparation” in the Work of Redemption) show, “preparation” again, was to hold a prominent place, with ascending movements to “achievement” and “realization,” analogous to the History of the Work of Redemption. Scheick’s thesis is simply counter to all extent evidence, as well as the theocentric impetus in Edwards’s thought.
143. Edwards mentions the problem of his conversion in the Personal Narrative, where he notes the conspicuous absence of the more axiomatic elements of the preparationist pattern of subjective phenomena, particularly, conviction by “legal fear,” terrors leading to contrition, and humiliation. The spiritual troubles relating to his own conversion experience are further recorded in the Diary: “The reason why I, in the least question my interest in God’s love and favor, is - 1. Because I cannot speak so fully to my experience of that preparatory work, of which divines speak: - 2. I do not remember that I experienced regeneration, exactly in those steps, in which divines say it is generally wrought” (Yale-Works, 16:773–74). A year later, Edwards intimates a skeptical conclusion to his self-evaluation over-against the parameters of Puritan preparationism. Assured of the instantaneousness of conversion, he now resolves to critically uncover the foundations of why “the people of New England, and anciently the Dissenters of Old England. .. used to be converted in those steps” in order to establish a more objective foundation for the nature of conversion (p. 779).
144. See Stephen R. Holmes’s excellent rehearsal of the “lapsarian debate” in this connection (God of Grace and God of Glory, 126–28).
145. Edwards, “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous” (1733), Banner-Works, 2:207–12.
146. Hence, statements like: “The glory of God [is]. .. of greater consequence than the welfare of thousands and millions of souls” (Banner-Works, 2:209).
147. W. G. T. Shedd, Calvinism Pure and Mixed (New York, 1893; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1999), 116–31.
148. Edwards, “Miscellanies” No. 520, in Yale-Works, 18:66.
149. See his most protracted meditation in defense of hell and reprobation in the 1755 essay “The Endless Punishment of Those Who Die Impenitent,” in The Works of President Edwards (ed. Samuel Austin; 8 vols.; Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1808–09), 6:20–42. Fiering notes: “It is significant that these definitive statements on hell were written at approximately the same time that Edwards was working on Original Sin and Two Dissertations (True Virtue and The End for Which God Created the World). All four problems were closely related in Edwards’s system” (Moral Thought, 238–39 n. 107).