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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
The rebirth of interest in the thought and life of Jonathan Edwards is fully justified, for he was truly one of the greatest philosopher-theologians that America has ever produced. One question of contemporary significance that to my knowledge has not been put to this unique thinker is the question of ‘faith and history’. In other words, the question how Edwards conceived the ground of faith as it relates to historical knowledge has not been raised in the growing body of secondary literature. I would like to put this question to Jonathan Edwards and unfold his answer as he develops it in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.
page 217 note 1 The rebirth of interest in Edwards may be illustrated both by the recent reprinting of his works and the numerous monographs treating his life and thought.
Works: Religious Affections, Smith, John, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959)Google Scholar. The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) has gone through four printingsGoogle Scholar. Freedom of the Will (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969)Google Scholar. Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., Ltd., 1971)Google Scholar. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974)Google Scholar, a reprint of the 1834 edition edited by Edward Hickman.
Monographs: Elwood, Douglas, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Columbia University, 1960)Google Scholar. Levin, David, ed. The Puritan in the Enlightenment: Franklin and Edwards (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1963)Google Scholar. Aldridge, Alfred O., Jonathan Edwards (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1966)Google Scholar. Cherry, Conrad, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards; A Reappraisal (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1966)Google Scholar. Davidson, Edward H., Jonathan Edwards, the Narrative of a Puritan Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1966)Google Scholar. Carse, James, Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility of God (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967)Google Scholar. Delattre, Roland, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. Opie, John, ed., Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1969)Google Scholar. Levin, David, ed., Jonathan Edwards, a Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969)Google Scholar. Dodds, Elizabeth, Marriage to a Difficult Man, the ‘Uncommon Union’ of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Rudisill, Dorus Paul, The Doctrine of the Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and His Successors (New York: Poseidon Books, Inc., 1971)Google Scholar. Holbrook, Clyde A., The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Winslow, Ola, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758 (1940; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1973)Google Scholar. Simonson, Harold, Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1974).Google Scholar
One other evidence of the rebirth of Edwards studies is the recent establishment of a Jonathan Edwards Consultation in the American Academy of Religion.
page 217 note 2 The rediscovery of this fact in recent scholarship is due above all to Perry Miller's intellectual biography of Edwards, , Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1949)Google Scholar. He says, for example, that Edwards ‘speaks from an insight into science and psychology so much ahead of his time that our own can hardly be said to have caught up with him’ (p. xiii). Miller's view was criticised by Thomas, Vincent, ‘The Modernity of Jonathan Edwards’, New England Quarterly, XXV (March, 1952).Google Scholar
page 218 note 1 The edition of Edwards' works that I will be citing is the Banner of Truth Trust edition cited above. The Religious Affections is found in vol. 1. All page numbers in the text will refer to this treatise.
page 218 note 2 For an historical survey of the problem from Lessing to Pannenberg see Fuller, Daniel P., Easter Faith and History (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1965), pp. 13–187.Google Scholar
page 218 note 3 Krentz, Edgar, The Historical-Critical Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).Google Scholar
page 218 note 4 Krentz, p. 67.
page 218 note 5 ‘Redemptive Event and History’, in Basic Questions in Theology, vol. 1, trans. Kehm, George H. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), p. 16.Google Scholar
page 218 note 6 ‘Insight and Faith’ in Basic Questions in Theology, vol. 2, p. 28.Google Scholar
page 218 note 7 ‘Insight and Faith’, p. 29. Althaus', critique is contained in ‘Offenbarung als Geschichte und Glaube. Bemerkungen zu Wolfhart Pannenbergs Begriff der Offenbarung’, Theologische Literatur zeitung, 88 (1963), cols. 81–92.Google Scholar
page 218 note 8 ‘Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation’ in Revelation as History, trans., Granskou, David (London: The Macmillan Co., 1968), p. 137.Google Scholar
page 219 note 1 Pannenberg develops his historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus most fully in Jesus, God and Man (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968), pp. 88–114.Google Scholar
page 219 note 2 In the 8th March 1976 issue of Time magazine Pannenberg commented, ‘I am not the most popular theologian in Germany. I am found guilty for referring to reason’ (p. 76).
page 219 note 3 See, for example, his article, ‘A New German Theological Movement’, Scottish journal of Theology, vol. 19, no. 2 (June 1966), pp. 160–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 219 note 4 Easter Faith and History, pp. 237f. Pannenberg's position is expressed in ‘Insight and Faith’, p. 33: ‘Believing trust can also arise in such a way that the believer does not always have to prove on his own the trustworthiness of the knowledge presupposed therein. It is the special task of theology to do this. Not every individual Christian needs to undertake this task. He can trust on the assumption that things are in order with respect to the ground of his trust. This point of view presupposes, of course, an atmosphere of confidence in the reliability of the Christian tradition.’
page 219 note 5 Winslow, Ola, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1785, p. 231.Google Scholar
page 220 note 1 From 1751 to 1758 Edwards was pastor of the church in the frontier town of Stockbridge, Mass., and missionary to the Indians. His concern for Indian evangelisation extends back into his pastorate at Northampton, as is shown by these comments in the Religious Affections which was written between 1742 and 1746.
page 221 note 1 See, for example, Carse, James, ‘Mr. Locke's Magic Onions and an Unboxed Beetle for Young Jonathan' in Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility of God, pp. 31–44Google Scholar. Davidson, Edward, Jonathan Edwards: The Narrative of a Puritan Mind, pp. 10–19Google Scholar. Opie, John, ed., ‘The Influence of John Locke upon Edwards’ in Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment, pp. 1–21Google Scholar. Simonson, Harold, ‘Locke and Empiricism’ in Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart, pp. 23–32.Google Scholar
page 222 note 1 Dwight, Sereno E., ‘Memoirs of Jonathan Edwards’, in Works, vol. 1, p. xviiGoogle Scholar. Perry Miller comments on Edwards' encounter with Locke, ‘The boy of fourteen grasped in a flash … that Locke was the master-spirit of the age’ (Jonathan Edwards, p. 52). Winslow, Ola writes, ‘Here was one who spoke the language for which he had been listening. It was neither the language of scientific observation nor that of theological dogma, but the pure serene [language] of abstract speculation’ (Jonathan Edwards, p. 61).Google Scholar
page 222 note 2 Thilly, Frank, A History of Philosophy, revised by Wood, Ledger (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1957), p. 333.Google Scholar
page 222 note 3 In Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637) he resolves ‘never to accept anything as true unless I recognized it to be evidently such: that is, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudgment, and to include nothing in my conclusions unless it presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that there was no occasion to doubt it’. Discourse on Method (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1956), p. 12.Google Scholar
page 222 note 4 Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart, p. 32.
page 225 note 1 Edwards does not fail to acknowledge here John Calvin's expression of the same conviction. He cites Institutes, Book I, Chapter 9: ‘It is not the office of the Spirit that is promised to us, to make new any before unheard of revelations or to coin some new kind of doctrine of the gospel; but to seal and confirm to us that very doctrine which is by the gospel.’ (Cited in a footnote on p. 285, col. 1.) Edwards could have shown other parallels between his thought and Calvin's; his emphasis on taste and sweetness recalls a quote from the Institutes, I, 7, 2: ‘As to the question, How shall we be persuaded that [the Scripture] came from God …? it is just the same as if we asked, How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?’ (quoted from the Beveridge translation). In the preface to Freedom of the Will Edwards wrote, ‘I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinctions sake [from Arminian]: though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing every thing just as he taught’ (Works, vol. I, p. 3).
page 226 note 1 This use of the term ‘internal evidences’ is not to be confused with the popular view that the Holy Spirit by an internal witness adds to the Scripture the additional information that the gospel or the Scripture is true. For example, Edwards' approach is not that of the modern Old Testament scholar Young, E. J. who said that the Christian ‘is convinced that the Bible is the Word of God, because God told him so’ (Thy Word is Truth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1951), p. 34)Google Scholar. Edwards stresses that the Holy Spirit does not add new information about the Scriptures but ‘enables the mind to view them as they are’ (p. 390, col. 1).