The Doctrine of Justification in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards

By Samuel T. Logan, Jr.

Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

I. Exposition of Edwards

1. Background of Edwards’s Sermons on Justification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Justification by Faith Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edwards then summarizes as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Distinction between Cause and Condition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTJ 46:1 (Spr 1984) p. 45

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

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

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

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

..... 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Edwards’s Understanding of “Fitness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Kenneth Stewart Sermon - Pilate Before Christ

The Princeton Mind in the Modern World and the Common Sense of J. Gresham Machen

By Darryl G. Hart

Johns Hopkins University, History Department, Baltimore, Maryland 21218

In his appraisal of Schleiermacher’s response to “What is Christianity?” Charles Hodge wrote that every theology is in one sense a form of philosophy. “To understand any theological system we must understand the philosophy that underlies it and gives it its peculiar form.”[1] It is uncertain whether Hodge would have applied this statement to his own theology and that of his associates at Princeton for when reading the writings of the Princeton theologians it seems that they considered themselves objective and neutral. In other words, Hodge and his theological heirs gave the impression that they were free from philosophical bias. This alleged neutrality, however, resulted as much from Princeton’s philosophical tendencies as from any sort of self-delusion.

The philosophical commitments that gave the Princeton theology its “peculiar form” were the principles of Scottish Common Sense Realism.[2] Sydney Ahlstrom and others have shown that Princeton was not unique in its adherence to the philosophy of Common Sense.[3] The spell of Common Sense also lured Unitarians at Harvard and moderate Calvinists at Yale. Scottish Realism was the philosophy of Victorian America.

Princeton’s uniqueness stems, however, from its persistent use of Common Sense even after this philosophy had fallen from grace in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. J. Gresham Machen, who expired the last official gasp of the Princeton theology,[4] serves as a prime example of Princeton’s reliance upon Common Sense. As George Marsden and Grant Wacker have demonstrated, in his day Machen was a fossil from the middle of the nineteenth century.[5] At a time when historicism informed the presuppositions of academia, Machen constantly appealed to the dictates of Common Sense.

Most assessments of Princeton have viewed its allegiance to Common Sense as either incompatible with its commitment to Reformed theology or naive. According to Ahlstrom, the price Princeton paid for aligning itself so closely with Scottish Realism was that it lost its “Reformation bearings,” its Augustinian brand of piety suffered, and the belief that Christianity had a proclamation to declare lost its vitality. “Doctrine became less a living language of piety than a complex burden to be borne.”[6] Marsden has made the point that because of its Common Sense epistemology, Princeton failed to recognize how much both point of view and cultural conditioning taint all human perceptions.[7] In this sense, Princeton’s evidential apologetic was superficial because it thought it could prove the truth of Christianity without taking into account an individual’s presuppositions.

While some of this criticism is valid, it also fails to recognize the virtues of Princeton’s use of Common Sense. Machen graphically represents the positive elements of the Princeton mind. Surrounded by the relativism of historicism and confronted with the problems of the Common Sense epistemology,[8] Machen still looked to Scottish Realism for sustenance. One might go so far as to say that with the underpinnings of Common Sense, Machen was able to weather the storms of modern thought and offer an incisive critique of modern religion. This essay will focus on the influence of Scottish Realism on Princeton’s thought, not as a liability but as a vital component in the resilience of the Princeton mind. By tracing first Princeton’s conceptions of truth, theology as a science, and the Bible as fact back to its philosophical commitments, I will attempt to identify the positive elements in Princeton’s use of Common Sense, particularly in the thought of Machen.

On September 25, 1929, at the opening of Westminster Theological Seminary, Machen announced the loss of Princeton Seminary from the evangelical cause. Machen was not just trying to increase enrollment. He considered Princeton’s toleration of board members in sympathy with the Auburn Affirmation a “great calamity.” For Machen the reorganization of Princeton had caused its death. But in the same breath that Machen pronounced Princeton dead, he also declared the resurrection of old Princeton. “The noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive,” he averred. “Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God’s grace to continue that tradition unimpaired; it will endeavor…to maintain the same principles that the old Princeton maintained.”[9]

As this quotation from Machen reflects, resistance to change was a trademark of the Princeton theology. Charles Hodge expressed this concern succinctly when he said, “I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this seminary.”[10] With this boast, Hodge articulated Princeton’s abhorrence of any sort of theological innovation that might obscure the truths of the Protestant Reformation. Francis L. Patton expanded on Hodge’s remark when he said that one of the distinctives of Princeton was that it had “no theological labels, no trademark.” Princeton simply taught Calvinism “without modification.” Princeton’s major task had been to resist obstinately “the modifications proposed elsewhere, being in their logical results subversive of Reformed faith…. Princeton’s boast, if she have reason to boast at all, is her unswerving fidelity to the Reformation.”[11]

Princeton’s orthodoxy expressed itself in the seminary’s commitment to the seventeenth-century scholasticism of Francis Turretin and the Westminster Confession of Faith. Turretin’s massive tome, Institutio theologicae elencticae, was the primary theological textbook at Princeton until the publication of Hodge’s Systematic Theology in 1872.[12] Princeton’s loyalty to the Westminster standards is manifested in the oath that was taken by every professor, one that restricted them from teaching or insinuating anything contrary to the Confession of Faith or the Catechisms.[13]

Princeton’s hesitancy to go beyond the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century stemmed from its conception of truth. Princeton was committed to the traditional Western view of truth as objective and invariable. Because the reformers of the sixteenth century had discovered theological truth and the Reformed scholastics had given the truth its fullest expression, there was no need to change.[14] Thus Princeton could by definition make no other contribution to the cause of orthodoxy other than a defense of the faith.

Given this apologetic posture, Princeton found Scottish Realism a natural ally for its efforts. Scottish Realism held truth in the same esteem as did Princeton.[15] According to John Witherspoon, who has been called the first real ambassador of the Scottish Philosophy,[16] truth is discovering things as they “really are in themselves,” and in their relations to each other.[17]

Witherspoon reflected the typical belief of Scottish Realism that it was possible to perceive the intelligible structures of the universe without any theoretical foundation. This view of truth was greatly reinforced by the British inductivism of Bacon and Newton. Inductivism guaranteed true knowledge methodologically; truth could be ascertained by the observation of real facts. Empiricism, however, the base on which inductivism rested, was being used in other systems to undermine rather than to support this understanding of objective truth. For example, David Hume questioned whether the idea imprinted on the mind by the senses corresponded to external objects; he thus reduced the certainty of scientific investigation to probability and ultimately to skepticism.[18] Hume’s skepticism provoked Thomas Reid, the archetypal Scottish philosopher,[19] to try to devise a firm foundation for inductive science and make truth secure.

Reid’s reply to the skepticism of Hume began with the epistemology of the real. To establish the reality of the external world, Reid argued for the validity of these first principles; that what men perceive with their senses really exists: that the mind perceives not merely ideas or appearances of things but the external objects themselves; that observation of the external world is the basis of all knowledge; that all men possess the capacities to organize the data received by experience.[20] These first principles affirmed the ability of the mind to perceive and know the external world immediately and truly; as a result, Reid shored up the sagging walls of inductivism by maintaining the antithesis of Hume.

For Reid and his retinue, the first principles of Scottish Realism were the basic beliefs on which all knowledge rested. They could not be proven, nor did they need to be because “no man in his wits calls them into question.”[21] It was sheer folly to doubt the mind’s ability to know the external world truly. By assuming these basic beliefs of knowledge, Reid reiterated the powers of inductive science. But because inductive science was the true method of philosophizing, the way for human understanding to gain factual knowledge of the real world, Reid was implicitly defending the idea of objective truth. The “real stake” in the Scottish Realist writings about the accuracy of human sense perception was not empiricism itself, but rather “the objective tangibility of the Newtonian world.”[22] In other words, the central issue between Reid and the skeptics was man’s ability to have true and certain knowledge. Without the solid foundation of Scottish Realist first principles, man was cut off from the inductive method and ultimately from all truth.

It is no wonder that Princeton so readily embraced Scottish Realism, because in the Princeton mind theology was a scientific discipline. There are two senses in which Princeton defined theology as a science. The first and more narrow sense pertains to the method of the theologian. Princeton fully adhered to the scientific inductive method as applied to the natural sciences. Hodge gave the inductive method the most comprehensive expression in his Systematic Theology. Recognizing the validity of Scottish Realist first principles, he described the first task of the theologian as the need to accept certain assumptions. He must assume that his sense perceptions and his “mental operations,” such as perceiving, comparing, combining, remembering, and inferring, are trustworthy. The theologian moreover must also rely on the certainty of those truths not learned from experience but which “are given in the constitution of our nature.”[23] Having done this, the theologian’s duty is to “ascertain, collect and combine all the facts” that God has revealed concerning himself and man’s relation to him. Finally, the theologian must structure his work according to the same rules “in the collection of facts, as govern the man of science.” This work must be done with “diligence and care,” and also it must be “comprehensive, and if possible, exhaustive.”[24] Once the facts have been ascertained, they must be put into a system. Just as the man of science knows not merely acts but also the laws that govern those acts, the theologian must exhibit the “internal relation to those facts, one to another, and each to all.”[25] This idea of theology as a science reinforced the Princeton conception of orthodoxy as objective truth.[26]

The other sense in which Princeton employed the term “science” follows directly from the first. In his article “Theology a Science,” B. B. Warfield made the “more fruitful distinction” of theology as knowledge. Theology is “the science of God,” and as such it has for its end the knowledge of God.[27] In this sense theology is as scientific as chemistry because it is aiming at true knowledge.[28] Because true knowledge required the proper method, the Christian theologian’s accuracy depended on how well he used the inductive method and examined the facts.

For Princeton the Bible contained the facts. In the Calvinist tradition of natural and supernatural revelation, the most direct and extensive communique from God to man was Scripture. It contained not only the natural knowledge of God as creator, but also the special knowledge of God as redeemer, revealing God’s salvific purposes for mankind. In Hodge’s words, the Scriptures contain “all the extant revelations” of God, which are designed to be “a rule of faith and practice” for the church. By affirming the completeness of God’s revelation in the Bible, Hodge did not mean to deny the real revelation of “God’s eternal power and Godhead” in nature. Even those truths are clearly made known in God’s written word.[29] Since the Bible contains completely God’s revelation, Scripture is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. “It is his storehouse of facts.”[30] Scripture contains all the particulars of knowledge of God, and since theology is the science of God, there is no other source of knowledge available to the theologian. In this context, the Bible is factual and therefore scientific as the object to which the inductive method is applied.

But according to Princeton, the Bible presents facts, not just in the sense of bits of information or doctrines about God, but also as an account of God’s redemptive acts in history. In this context the Bible is factual and scientific because it “teaches certain things about which science has a right to speak.”[31] The Bible makes specific claims in the sphere of history. Thus Scripture contains factual information about God and history. It may not be empirically possible to test the assertions about God, but the historical accounts are matters of fact and subject to scientific verification.[32] In this sense the Bible is as scientific and true as the textbook on the history of the American revolution.

Embellished by the storehouse of facts in Scripture and the theological method of inductivism, Christianity’s claims to truth made it an apologetic religion, capable of reasonable defense.[33] Taking full advantage of Princeton’s accommodation of science, Warfield wrote, “It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to its dominion.”[34] Christianity’s appeal meant that apologetical theology was the most important of all the theological disciplines at Princeton. The reason for the prominence was obvious. It has as much to do with the nature of truth as with the way man knows truth. The work of the exegete, the historian, and the systematist hangs in the balance until, when their labors are finished, they “wipe their steaming brows” and decide whether they have been studying “realities” or only “fancies.”[35] For Christianity to be true it must deal with facts. Thus the task of apologetics is to establish the existence of God, the capacity of the human mind to know him, and the accessibility of knowledge concerning him.[36] The work done by the apologist gives theology scientific respectability because all sciences are involved in the reality of the subject matter, the ability of the mind to perceive the subject matter, and the existence of a medium of communication between the subject matter and the percipient and the understanding mind.[37]

During Machen’s lifetime, however, the growing forces of scientific positivism, historicism, and higher criticism had thrown the scientific nature of theology into disrepute. What Washington Gladden had described in the 1890s as “a going in the tops of trees,”[38] had reached the status of a tropical storm by the 1920s. At the leading seminaries or divinity schools most of the theologians questioned the historical accuracy of Scripture, thereby undermining Christianity’s claim to objective truth. The storehouse of facts for the theologian was no longer factual. Particularly the claims of evolution and the higher criticism forced many theologians, who were accustomed to the accommodation of theology to science,[39] to abandon some of the incredible claims of Scripture.[40] This “liberal” response to the new learning, however, did not intend to abandon the truth or authority of Scripture. Instead, liberalism made the distinction between religious and scientific truth, insisting that the Bible was still true in spiritual matters. Thus Christianity could still be true even though Scripture might be scientifically false.

Machen would have nothing to do with the liberal proposal for peace with science because this abandonment of the intellect in matters of religion would not satisfy the rigorous demands of faith. For Princeton, faith was a highly rational affair. Faith in the irrational is impossible. Moreover because faith is the belief that something is true, an individual cannot have faith in something that the mind sees to be false. Consequently, knowledge is essential to faith, for truth must be known in order to be believed. Faith then is limited by knowledge because “we can believe only what we know, i.e., what we intelligently apprehend.” As a result, knowledge is the measure of faith; what lies beyond knowledge escapes faith.[41] In complete harmony with this condensed version of Hodge’s discussion of knowledge and faith, Machen declared that faith involves the acceptance of a proposition. “It is impossible…to have faith in a person without accepting with the mind the facts about the person.”[42] Machen’s emphasis upon the intellectual aspect of faith followed necessarily from the Princeton view of truth. That liberalism could have faith in something that it acknowledged to be false was truly beyond belief.

Machen also rejected liberalism’s effort to save the truth of Christianity because the sort of anti-intellectualism that equally accepted the truth of all creeds would ultimately lead to skepticism.[43] The way to avoid the skepticism of liberalism for Machen was simply a “matter of common sense.”[44] Just as the founders of Princeton had employed the Common Sense philosophy to counter the skepticism of Paine and Hume, Machen repeatedly appealed to axioms of Common Sense to defend the truth of Christianity.

As a representative of the Princeton mind, Machen demonstrated the importance of three principles of Common Sense Realism for his apologetic efforts. The first was the principle of universality: the basic beliefs of the Common Sense epistemology were held by all men in every age. According to Reid, these first principles were confirmed by “the universal consent of mankind,” not by philosophers only but also by “the rude and unlearned vulgar.”[45] The second axiom involved the function and nature of human language. Reid argued that language could truthfully communicate the real world. Language was the “express image and picture” of human thought because to conceive the meaning of a word and the object that it signifies was the “same” process.

In this way the meaning of the word was the object conceived.[46] This one-to-one correspondence between the word and the object it signifies implied that a description of the actual world was as reliable as the “perception of a fact,” as long as it was accurately described.[47] The third Common Sense principle dealt with man’s ability to remember and know the past. Knowledge of the past posed a problem for the empiricist if knowledge was only received through the senses. Reid’s solution involved the universal ability of all men to remember the past, and to distinguish the object or event remembered from the remembrance of it. In other words, when man remembers Rome, he does not remember an idea of Rome but Rome itself.[48] Thus past events are communicated by testimonies based on memory, and the knowledge gained through these testimonies is factual because memory is the remembrance of the thing itself.

Equipped with these Common Sense maxims, Machen unleashed an insightful critique of liberalism while defending the truth of Christianity. The most important component of Machen’s arguments was the Bible. Because Scripture was the only source for knowledge of God, Christianity’s claims to truth depended on the accuracy of the Bible. Apart from this, the truth of the Bible could not be autonomous from science, because Scripture was scientific in so far as it told the truth about the events of first century Palestine.

But before Machen could defend the historicity of the Bible, the modern presuppositions of liberalism required refutation.[49] At this point the Scottish Realist notions of the universality of the Common Sense epistemology and ability of language to communicate facts proved to be quite useful. William Newton Clarke articulated the historicist presuppositions of the modern mind in Sixty Years with the Bible. According to Clarke it was very difficult for modern readers to understand ancient texts. “The historical setting can never be perfectly reproduced in the reader’s mind.” For Clarke it was even more difficult to understand another mind, especially “when the other speaks out of another age and training.”[50] Machen maintained, however, contrary to Clarke, that the way men gain knowledge is essentially the same everywhere and at all times. Machen postulated that if every generation has its own thought forms and cannot use the thought forms of another generation, “then books produced in past generations ought to be pure gibberish to us.”[51] For Machen, the consistent use of historicist presuppositions implied that the meaning of the words of Aristotle, for instance, “began to wobble and has been wobbling for twenty-two centuries.”[52] Such an idea was ridiculous to Machen; Aristotle’s book was “just as limpidly clear and logical” as it had ever been.[53] The reason for Aristotle’s clarity was a common intellectual ground, a “gold standard,” which enables all men of all times and places to understand each other perfectly well. Thus Machen did not believe in the separate existence of an Oriental, Occidental, ancient, medieval, or modern mind. There may be difficulty in understanding the mental processes of different minds, he conceded, “but the very fact that we can both detect that difficulty affords hope that the difficulty may be overcome,” because recognition of this difficulty “shows that there is a common intellectual ground on which we can stand.”[54]

Machen’s use of the grammatico-historical method of exegesis follows from the Common Sense confidence in language. Far from Harry E. Fosdick’s view of language, which interpreted Scripture as the “changing categories” of “abiding experiences,”[55] Machen interpreted the language of biblical authors as actually expressing what the writers saw or experienced. Maintaining the harmony of science and orthodoxy, Machen termed this method the “scientific historical method.” It only required that the biblical writers should be allowed to speak for themselves rather than that the student of the Bible use exegesis as a platform for what he would like to say or what he wished the authors would have said.[56] If Luke wrote that Christ was born of a virgin, he was not expressing a spiritual truth in a mythical category; rather, he intended exactly what he wrote. Machen went to great lengths to show this in The Virgin Birth of Christ, weighing all objections and explanations of modern criticism at that time.[57] Machen believed that what Luke intended by his account of the virgin birth was a description of scientific fact. Thus if Luke wrote this knowing that it never happened, his report would be a lie. This either-or method of interpretation did not allow the critic to twist the statements of Scripture in order to make them acceptable and authoritative to a mind predisposed not to believe such a claim. The critic cannot substitute his interpretation for the intention of the author in an effort to cover up what he perceives to be blatant scientific discrepancies in Scripture. If he does, the critic is not being fair to the author, nor is he practicing good interpretation. For Machen the grammatico-historical method ensured fair play and would not allow any hedging on the question of the truth of Scripture.

Machen combined this Scottish Realist view of language and the belief in the universality of mankind with the Common Sense conception of memory to defend the Bible as a collection of first century testimonies about Christ. That the biblical writers trusted their memories along with the memories of other eyewitnesses was obvious. For Machen, Luke was a good example because he had been in contact with Christ’s brother, James, and with many other members of the primitive Jerusalem church. Luke gives evidence also of his presence in Palestine between AD 58 and 60. Obviously Luke had the fullest opportunity for acquainting himself with the occurrences described in his written works: the conversion of Paul, the events of the life of Christ, and the beginnings of the primitive church.[58] For Machen, the gospel narratives were trustworthy and a firm foundation upon which to base faith. The contemporary reader should be no less compelled than Paul, who based his conviction of the truth of Christianity on the accounts of the original apostles,[59] to believe the testimonies contained in the NT. Because courts of law would be unable to function without assuming the validity of human testimony,[60] the readers of the Bible must only imagine themselves as members of a jury while the biblical writers come forward to the witness stand. Using this imagery of the court, Machen vouched for the “self-evidencing quality” of the witnesses. “Personal testimony is a very subtle thing; when you face a witness on the witness stand the credence which you give his testimony is dependent…on a subtle impresion.” Machen encouraged the jury to read one of the Gospel narratives through from beginning to end with the speed usually applied to the morning paper. The impression that would be made on the mind is that the witness is describing events which really happened, and that the Gospels are not full of fables or fancies but rather are testimonies to the truth about Christ the Savior and his work on earth to redeem mankind.[61] Related to Machen’s concern for the truth of Scripture is his defense of the truth of creeds or confessions. Machen’s reasoning at this point, like that of his predecessors, is again dependent on Common Sense principles about the power of language to communicate objective truth and about the proper method of interpretation. Hodge foreshadowed Machen’s arguments in his review of Edwards A. Park’s sermon, “The Theology of the Feelings and that of the Intellect.” Park’s intention in the sermon was one of reconciliation; his purpose was to show that all creeds “which are allowable” can be reconciled with each other.[62] The allowable creeds as Hodge understood Park were “the two great antagonistic” systems of Calvinism and Arminianism.[63] Park’s method of performing this “good service” was to admit the truth of both systems by distinguishing two separate theologies, one of the intellect and one of the feelings, which may be made to mean precisely the same thing. In other words, these two systems are merely two forms of the same theology; the one “precise” and designed to engage the intellect, and the other “vague and intense” and adapted to move the feelings.[64] Hodge enumerated many objections to Park’s sermon, but his main objection focused on the question of truth and the capacity of language to communicate true thought. “The question is not, which of the antagonistic systems of theology described above is true…. The question is whether there is any correct theory of interpretation by which the two systems can be harmonized.”[65] In Hodge’s mind it was inconceivable that two systems that contradicted each other at so many points could be declared to be identical in meaning. It was the equivalent of destroying the meaning of church history; in effect it reduced all the great doctrinal debates to mere arguments over words, as if the parties, whether Augustinians or Pelagians, Thomists or Scotists, were essentially in perfect agreement.[66] Hodge’s answer to Park was, “If there be any power in language to express thought, if human speech be anything more than an instrument of deception, then these systems of doctrine are distinct and irreconcilable.”[67]

In Christianity and Liberalism Machen tried to show, as Hodge had done with Park, that two antagonistic systems were distinct and irreconcilable, or in Machen’s own words, that liberalism was un-Christian.[68] One of the objections that Machen anticipated and answered sounds much like the reconciliatory efforts of Park. The objection states that the teachings of liberalism “might be as far removed as possible from the teachings of historic Christianity, and yet the two might be at bottom the same.”[69] As this statement suggests, however, the range of creeds allowable for reconciliation had become so broad that Machen was faced with a new creed from which to distinguish orthodoxy. The new creed of liberalism had lost its power to communicate thought in that even though the words were the same, the meaning was entirely different. For instance, liberals affirmed the fatherhood of God and because of this considered themselves within the fold of Christianity.[70] But for Machen the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God had no part in Christ’s teaching or historic Christianity, and liberalism’s use of Christian terminology, with its historic connotations, was outright “dishonesty” when the religious teacher, aware of his radicalism, was “unwilling to relinquish his place in the hallowed atmosphere of the Church by speaking his whole mind.”[71] Even though the creeds of Park and liberalism differed and the debate had shifted from a defense of orthodoxy to a defense of Christian theism itself, Hodge’s and Machen’s arguments were in essence the same; whether different words and their corresponding thoughts were irreconcilable or the same in their meanings.

In Machen’s opinion, however, liberalism played this juggling act not only with the meanings of words, but also with the truth or intellectual disciplines. He saw that the attempt to reconcile the truth of religion with the truth of science was a glaring form of skepticism. By accepting the truth of science in the sphere of religion, which were blatantly opposed at some points, liberalism was engaged in the “blight of pragmatism.”[72] According to Machen, pragmatism maintained the position that two contradictory statements may be equally good; consequently there is no possibility of a permanent and universal truth.[73] This pragmatic solution to the apparent contradictions of religion and science was actually “bottomless skepticism” because of the Princeton conception of truth. “We do not see how two statements can be equally ‘sound’ and not equally ‘true.’“[74] Religion is as “scientific” as science because each is equally concerned with truth. If science could show that these claims of Christianity in the sphere of history were false, then the Christian religion should be abandoned.[75]

It was just at this point, however, the sphere of history, that Machen showed that the liberal reconciliation of science and religion would not work. The traditional teaching of Christianity was rooted in historical facts. The most notable fact was the resurrection of Christ. Consequently, the discipline that could “establish” this fact was, as Machen called it, “historical science.” Historical science can confirm this event just as it does any other aspect of history, by examining whether the books or testimonies which document the event are accurate, because this involves a thorough examination of the biblical narratives, something which engaged much of Machen’s intellectual enterprises.[76] The truth of the Bible, however, was not the primary concern at this point of Machen’s argument. Just as Hodge had opposed Park over the reconcilability of the antagonistic systems of Calvinism and Arminianism, Machen opposed liberalism because it ignored the contradictory claims of science and religion in the sphere of history. Because Christianity taught the resurrection as an historic fact, “The Bible then…most emphatically does teach science; and the separation between science and religion breaks down.”[77]

The compatibility of religion and science was important also for Machen because his definition of the gospel and the object of faith turned directly on the findings of science, especially historical science. According to Machen, the interdependence of doctrine and history was undeniable. As he was so fond of pointing out, “‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for sins’—that is doctrine.”[78] The Christian message to the world, therefore, is not the moral platitudes of liberalism. Rather, the gospel is what the term “gospel” means, good news.[79] It is the narration of an event that took place in the first century. But it is also more than merely just a relating of facts. The gospel as presented in Scripture also contains the meaning of the facts, the authoritative interpretation.[80] Thus there was no denying just the facts or just doctrine; both are so closely bound that to deny one necessitates the denial of the other. The bearing that the web of history and doctrine has on faith is that one cannot merely believe in the doctrinal statements of Christianity without believing those statements are historically based, or true. Because faith, in the Princeton sense, is based on the true knowledge of its object, the Christian’s faith in the gospel depends on the truth of the historical claims of “the good news.” For Machen this was not a hindrance, rather the facts of Christianity were the assurance that his faith was in something that was universally and permanently true.[81]

Because Machen maintained the truth of Christianity and the compatibility of religion and science, he was prone to feel much more at home with scientists than with liberals, even though the scientists might be avowed atheists because of their discoveries in the laboratory. Machen’s relative comfort with science was due to his idea of truth. At the point of truth, Machen considered himself very much like a scientist because he based his faith on facts. In this way Machen represented well the Princeton accommodation of science. While discussing the pragmatist theologian’s low view of truth as relative and in flux, Machen admitted that the scientist does often change his hypotheses, but he maintained that theories are not modified because the scientist thinks that truth is relative and subjective. Rather this change of opinion is due to “a better explanation of the facts.” Machen’s point was that new hypotheses, like the old, at least are intended to be permanently correct. “Science, in other words, though it may not in any generation attain truth, is at any rate aiming at truth.”[82] Thus, Machen was scientific because he maintained the ideal of absolute truth based on all the facts.[83]

Machen’s accommodation of science is an interesting point at which to appraise his reliance upon the Common Sense philosophy. His conception of theology as a science carried on the traditional Princeton concern for truth, and it illustrates the importance of Scottish Realism for Princeton’s allegiance to truth. In “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” James Ward Smith writes of two types of accommodation of science. The first is the accommodation of scientific content. Liberalism exemplified this when it made the spheres of religion and science autonomous because evolution and many of the naturalist presuppositions associated with science contradicted the claims of Christianity. Liberalism accepted these conclusions of science and mapped out for itself another area for work, independent of the findings of science. The other sort of accommodation of which Smith writes was illustrated by Machen in the quotation above. This is the accommodation of method.[84] Machen aligned himself completely with the inductive method of deriving conclusions from a careful examination of facts. For Machen this was the only way to obtain permanent and objective truth.

As others have shown, the inductive method of Bacon, to which Machen adhered, was the cause for which Scottish Realism stood.[85] Reid’s work was largely designed to rescue Bacon’s method from Hume’s skepticism. Machen’s allegiance to inductivism, even in the twentieth century when much of the evidence appeared to contradict Christianity, followed from his acceptance of Scottish Realist principles. Probably the greatest principle that gave Machen sustenance was the Common Sense principle of truth as objective and absolute. Although not explicitly stated in Reid’s first principles, it is implied by his assumptions of the mind’s ability to know reality truly through the senses, and of the universality of the way man receives knowledge. It is further implied in his endorsement of the inductive method. With this conception of truth, buttressed by Common Sense axioms of knowledge, Machen was “obliged to keep…to the high, rough intellectualistic road of a sound epistemology.”[86]

As mentioned at the outset, some have questioned how sound Machen’s epistemology really was. George Marsden, with whose balanced remarks it is difficult to argue, has applied Smith’s thesis in “Religion and Science in American Philosophy” to nineteenth-century American apologists and found what Smith calls a superficial accommodation of science.[87] Smith calls accommodation superficial when it merely adds the corpus of science to religious beliefs without taking seriously the first principles of modern science. As examples, Smith cites the Puritan’s accommodation of Newtonian science and liberalism’s accommodation of Darwinism.[88] Marsden believes that nineteenth-century evidentialist apologists were guilty of a superficial accommodation of method when they underestimated how much “basic first beliefs and commitments can pervade the rest of one’s intellectual activity.”[89] Machen, who is very much a part of the evidentialist tradition at Princeton, falls under the same criticism. According to Marsden, Machen’s epistemology is deficient because of his devaluation of subjective aspects in knowing religious truth.[90] Although he nuances his remarks enough to say that Machen’s epistemology outstripped that of most of his contemporaries, Marsden still suggests that a “presuppositionalist approach to truth,” one that takes into account the subjective elements of knowing, would have more room in it for differences in opinion and perspective.[91] A presuppositional approach to truth would also take into account better the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, enabling men to understand the truths of the gospel.[92]

Interestingly enough, a contemporary of Machen leveled a similar criticism against him. Intrigued by the claims of modernism, W. O. Carver criticized Machen for failing to deal adequately with the subjective elements of religious knowledge or faith. In his review of Christianity and Liberalism, Carver suggested that in its emphasis on doctrine Machen’s “interpretation” of Christianity was “far too external and too dependent on formal logic.” Carver wondered where Machen’s recognition of the inner workings of the Holy Spirit had gone and surmised that Machen had not so much as heard that there is a Holy Spirit.[93] In Carver’s opinion, the advice needed by the ones struggling with the claims of modernity was not the inflammatory arguments of Machen, but rather the “‘doctrine’ of the Holy Spirit, who is our ‘Comforter’, the living presence of Christ in the life of the church as it brings this Christ into the life of the world.”[94]

The appeal of the Holy Spirit in the experience of the believer was what Carver found so attractive in the modernism of Fosdick. Even though he was critical of Fosdick on many points, Carver believed that Fosdick’s use of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as the agent of regeneration in the concept of “Abiding Experiences and Changing Categories,” would be a “turning point to faith and peace for many a troubled soul.”[95]

But Machen, always wary of the use of Christian terminology as a smoke-screen for doctrinal impurity, would not cater to the alleged needs of the modern mind. For Machen, the liberal appeal to religious experience under the guise of the testimony of the Holy Spirit was really the abandonment of objective truth in the sphere of religion.[96] Even Clarke believed that the appeal to the subjective, spiritual discernment of the believer would yield an objective standard for determining the truth of the Bible,[97] but he still asserted that Christianity had its power in spirit and life. “It cannot be formulated” because the “spiritual glory” of the religious experience as a criterion for truth was its lack of precision and rigidity.[98] Contrary to this liberal impulse toward “life” away from doctrine, Machen insisted that what the age needed was not more spirituality in the modern sense of the word but rather more precision and clarity, in other words, more doctrine.

Given the task of trying to distinguish orthodox Christianity from liberalism, it is no wonder that Machen overemphasized doctrine and the intellectual elements of faith. But to grant that Machen allowed little room for the inner workings of the Holy Spirit is perhaps too great a concession. True to his conception of theology as a science, Machen often discussed dispositions and presuppositions in scientific terminology. Ignorance of “the fact of sin” was what kept men from being “truly scientific” in their evaluation of the claims of Christianity. This means that to see the truth of anything one must examine all the facts. But recognition of the fact of sin is not a matter of empirical observation.[99] Rather it only comes through the regenerating work of the Spirit of God for only through the Holy Spirit’s conviction of any sin may the evidence for Christianity be convincing. Machen admitted that without the conviction of sin the evidence for the resurrection would be insufficient because of “the enormous weight of presumption” not to accept a miracle. “It is impossible to prove first that Christianity is true, and then proceed on the basis of its truth to become conscious of one’s sin; for the fact of sin is itself one of the chief foundations upon which the proof is based.”[100] Recognition of the fact of sin then was really a predisposition to believe the miraculous, redemptive acts of God in history because “The gospel cannot be understood unless its presuppositions,” the Christian view of God and man, “are accepted.”[101] Thus only a person under the influence of the Holy Spirit can “believe in the resurrection of Christ and…accept the claims of Christianity.”[102]

Machen’s recognition of the necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit for accepting Christianity as true should not be viewed as evidence that he was actually a presuppositionalist. In the passage cited above, Machen still talks about the objectivity of a “clear mind” accepting the truth of Christianity no matter what one’s “personal attitude” might be.[103] Paying deference to the teaching of Warfield, Machen affirmed that “The old order of apologetics is correct first there is God; second it is likely that He should reveal Himself; third, He has actually revealed Himself in Christ.”[104] These statements must be balanced, however, with his discussion of the fact of sin and presuppositions. Machen did not think that he could argue a person into the kingdom. He did recognize the subjective and in this sense was not naive or overly optimistic about the powers of apologetics.

Even though Machen insisted upon the temporal priority of the work of the Holy Spirit in faith, he spent most of his time defending the logical truth of Christianity. A fundamental distinction in Machen’s thought is the logical versus the temporal order of faith.[105] This distinction is important for understanding Machen’s apologetics and the Princeton tradition that he represented. In the temporal order of faith Machen conceded that the believer’s experience of regeneration by the Holy Spirit is fundamental. In this sense Christianity is based upon the experience of new birth. But Machen was quick to add that “what the Holy Spirit does in the new birth is not to make a man a Christian regardless of the evidence, but on the contrary to clear away the mists from his eyes and enable him to attend to the evidence.”[106] The new birth is not devoid of content. Faith involves assent to the truth of the gospel. In this sense doctrine comes logically before Christian experience. This logical priority of doctrine and the intellect is rooted in the Princeton conception of faith and knowledge; it is impossible to have faith in something that is known to be false. As William B. Green summarized, “while we often believe without logic, could we continue to believe against logic?”[107]

In this context, Machen’s defense of the intellectual aspects of faith does not seem to be a defect in his Calvinistic conceptions of sin and grace. Instead, Machen’s arguments preserve fundamental insights for a biblically based faith.[108] As the apostle Paul wrote, “If Christ be not risen…your faith is also in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). While Machen would have admitted that the acceptance of Christ’s resurrection depends on the conviction of sin, with Paul he would have also insisted upon the consequences if the resurrection were denied—”If the Bible were false, your faith would go.” The consequences of denying the truth of Christianity are a major factor in Machen’s arguments.[109] Representing well the forcefulness of the Princeton apologetic, Machen required that the question “Is Christianity true?” be addressed; the issue could not be sidestepped with the qualification that Christianity is religiously true. For Machen the real issue was not what argument should be used to prove the truth of Christianity but whether indeed the gospel were fact or fancy. According to Machen, the historic position of Christianity was rooted in the historical fact of Christ’s death and resurrection. To admit this was only a matter of common honesty and common sense. Even though Christianity was more than history (“we must know Christianity in our inner lives”), it was still founded on the proclamation of an event that occurred in first-century Palestine.[110]

Machen’s reliance upon the principles of Common Sense Realism enabled him to adhere confidently to the historic position of Christianity and defend the historical claims of Scripture. Certainly in the context of liberalism, at a time when Christianity had lost its “cosmic sense” and was no more than a life well led,[111] Hodge would have called Machen’s stand for orthodoxy the rock of Gibraltar in the midst of an ever-flowing stream of religious ideas. Consequently Machen’s use of Common Sense should not be maligned. Even though this philosophical system may have boded ill for nineteenth-century apologists it must also be credited with giving Machen sustenance. Indeed Machen’s common sense allowed him to aver the old Princeton refrain of a “clean choice between Christian orthodoxy or no Christianity at all.”[112]

Notes

1. Charles Hodge, “What is Christianity?” Princeton Review 32 (1860) 121.
2. See Theodore D. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1977); Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1978); and John C. Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture: A Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, NJ: Mack, 1978).
3. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” CH 24 (1955) 257–72. For others see Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America 1800–1860, 13, 14; and Mark Noll, The Princeton Theology 1812–1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckinridge (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983) 30.
4. Mark Noll observes the persistence of the Princeton theology at Westminster Seminary and in such figures as John Gerstner and Roger Nicole in The Princeton Theology 1812–1921, 18.
5. Marsden, “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” WTJ 42 (1979–80) 157–75; and Wacker, “Augustus H. Strong; A Conservative Confrontation with History” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1978) 10–13.
6. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” 268.
7. This is Marsden’s argument in “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia” (forthcoming). He makes the similar point with specific reference to Machen in “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” 168–75.
8. Machen showed his awareness of the problems of the “common sense epistemology” in What is Faith? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1925) 26.
9. Machen, “Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan,” in What is Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951) 230.
10. Quoted in A. A. Hodge, Life of Charles Hodge (New York: Scribner’s, 1880) 521.
11. Francis L. Patton, “Princeton Seminary and the Faith,” in Centennial of Princeton Seminary (Princeton: At the Seminary, 1912) 349–50.
12. John W. Stewart, “The Princeton Theologians: The Tethered Theology” (uncompleted Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan) IV/7.
13. The Plan of the Theological Seminary (Philadelphia: Aitken, 1816) 11.
14. Ralph J. Danhof nonetheless detected “strains of Humanism” in Hodge’s theology (Charles Hodge as a Dogmatician [Goes, The Netherlands: Oosterbaan, 1929] 174).
15. This is not meant to imply that other schools of thought or seminaries held error or falsehood in high regard. I only mean that Princeton maintained a view of truth as objective, absolute, and invariable. This view persisted at Princeton even after the rise of Darwinism when truth was conceived of as in flux of as constantly changing.
16. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” 261.
17. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 57.
18. See Hodge’s Systematic Theology (New York: Scribner’s, 1871; reprinted Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975) 1.212ff for the perils of Hume’s skepticism.
19. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology” 260.
20. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (London: The Proprietors, 1818) 1–23.
21. Ibid., 213.
22. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 55.
23. Hodge, Systematic Theology 1.9.
24. Ibid., 11.
25. Ibid., 1.
26. Bozeman (Protestants in an Age of Science, 155) calls Hodge’s method the most thoroughgoing endorsement of inductivism by the Old School.
27. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968) 2.213.
28. This is Machen’s argument in “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” Princeton Theological Review 24 (1926) 38–66, esp. p. 51.
29. Hodge, Systematic Theology 1.182.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Machen, What is Faith? 241.
32. Although sometimes the two were inextricably bound as in the case of miracles. See Warfield, “The Question of Miracles,” Selected Shorter Writings 2.167–206.
33. Warfield, “Christianity the Truth,” Selected Shorter Writings 2.213.
34. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Selected Shorter Writings 2.91.
35. Ibid., 96.
36. Warfield, “Apologetics,” Studies in Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932) 10.
37. Ibid.
38. Washington Gladden, Recollections (1909) 262–66, quoted in William R. Hutchison’s The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 77.
39. See James Ward Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University, 1961) 402–42 for an excellent essay on the accommodation of science.
40. See Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1957) 46–78 for examples in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.
41. Hodge, Systematic Theology 3.78–79.
42. Machen, What is Faith? 47.
43. Ibid., 16-45.
44. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924) 20.
45. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1871) 409.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Stewart, “The Princeton Theologians: The Tethered Theology” IV/34.
49. See Marsden, “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” for an excellent discussion of Princeton’s conception of history.
50. William Newton Clarke, Sixty Years with the Bible (New York: Scribner’s, 1910) 167–68.
51. Machen, “Life Founded Upon Truth,” in The Christian Faith in the Modern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947) 91–92.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 93-94.
55. Harry E. Fosdick, The Modern Use of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1925) 97–130.
56. Machen, What is Faith? 42.
57. See Machen, “The Virgin Birth of Christ,” in What is Christianity? 84-87, for the importance of the virgin birth as a test of orthodoxy.
58. Machen, “The Witness of the Gospels,” in What is Christianity? 51.
59. Warfield, “The Resurrection of Christ a Historical Fact,” Selected Shorter Writings 1.185.
60. Hodge appeals to the court of law to demonstrate the importance of human testimony in Systematic Theology 1.40.
61. Machen, “The Witness of the Gospels,” 53.
62. Hodge, “The Theology of the Intellect and that of the Feelings,” Essays and Reviews (New York: R. Carter & Brothers, 1857) 587.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 586.
65. Ibid., 585.
66. Ibid., 591-92.
67. Ibid., 597.
68. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 7.
69. Ibid., 18.
70. Ibid., 59.
71. Ibid., 18.
72. Ibid., 23.
73. Machen, What is Faith? 31.
74. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 54.
75. See Ned Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955) 113–29, for Machen’s personal struggle with the truth of Christianity.
76. See Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1921); and The Virgin Birth of Christ (New York: Harpers, 1930).
77. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 50.
78. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 27.
79. Ibid., 121.
80. Ibid.
81. Machen however did not deprecate experience. See “History and Faith,” What is Christianity? 182.
82. Machen, What is Faith? 29.
83. One important fact was that of sin. See Christianity and Liberalism, 64-66.
84. Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” 413–25.
85. See Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, and Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America 1800–1860.
86. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 66.
87. Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia.”
88. Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” 402–25.
89. Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” 68–69.
90. Marsden, “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” 168.
91. Ibid.
92. Marsden makes this point with reference to a comparison between Warfield and Abraham Kuyper in “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” 53–63.
93. W. O. Carver, review of Christianity and Liberalism in RevExp 21 (1924) 345–46.
94. Ibid., 349.
95. Carver, review of The Modern Use of the Bible in RevExp 22 (1925) 254.
96. Machen, “The Modern Use of the Bible,” in What is Christianity? 264-66.
97. “I am assuming, indeed, that we believe in the reality of large spiritual truth discernible by powers divinely influenced” (W. N. Clarke, The Use of Scriptures in Theology [New York: Scribner’s, 1905] 74).
98. Ibid.
99. Although it does involve attending to the law of God and the perfection of Christ (What is Faith? 133).
100. Ibid., 134.
101. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 61–62.
102. Machen, What is Faith? 136. In a most revealing statement, Machen shows a thorough recognition of the difference that perspective and point of view make on education, “A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school” (“The Necessity of the Christian School,” in What is Christianity? 301).
103. Machen, What is Faith? 136.
104. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 59.
105. “It is the very essence of Christianity that doctrine comes (logically though not temporally) before Christian experience” (ibid., 43).
106. Machen, “Life Founded Upon Truth,” 63.
107. Green, review of E. Y. Mullins, Why is Christianity True? in Princeton Theological Review 4 (1906) 402.
108. Marsden makes this similar point about Machen in “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” 174–75, and about Warfield in “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” 63–68.
109. Machen, “History and Faith,” 183.
110. Machen, “What is Christianity?” in What is Christianity? 18.
111. Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” 430.
112. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, 258.