About Edwards
Jonathan Edwards : Philosopher
by Professor Mark Noll, Wheaton College
Links on this website take inquirers to the scholarship of real experts on Edwards’s philosophy, like Wallace Anderson, Norman Fiering, Allen Guelzo, Bruce Kuklick, Sang Lee, and Amy Plantinga Pauw. But as a historian, I have always been deeply impressed by how Edwards’s vision led him naturally and, it seemed, effortlessly to engage the most profound philosophical issues.
The unifying center of Edwards's life was the glory of God experienced as an active, harmonious, ever unfolding source of absolutely perfect Being marked by supernal beauty and love. The dynamic activity of the Godhead, especially as manifest in the Trinity, was ever in the forefront. Against many of the optimistic opinions of his century, Edwards defended Calvinistic convictions about the lostness of humanity and the need for divine grace to initiate redemption. Yet with the spirit of his age, Edwards also promoted an affectional view of reality in which “the sense of the heart” (one of his favorite phrases) was foundational for thought and action alike. The cast of Edwards's mind was relentlessly intellectual—“many theorems, that appeared hard and barren to others, were to him pleasant and fruitful fields, where his mind would expatiate with peculiar ease, profit and entertainment,” was the way his friend and student, Samuel Hopkins, put it (Ethical Writings, 401). As a result, Edwards delighted in abstruse metaphysical questions almost as much as in theological or biblical challenges. In this respect, Edwards shared much with his near contemporaries, the Catholic Nicholas Malebranche and the Anglican George Berkeley, both of whom also developed forms of theistic idealism in response to what they perceived as the philosophical drift of their age.
Edwards was fascinated by the discoveries of Newton and his successors. Yet, fearing the threat of materialism in such work, he argued that the laws of science were not self-subsisting. Rather, they were products of God's self-conscious intellectual activity. Edwards was not threatened by these discoveries because he felt they revealed the regularity, harmony, and beauty of the Divine Being. A division between the spiritual and the material was as uncongenial to Edwards's thought as it was commonplace in the Enlightenment more generally. To Edwards, progress in science showed more about the character of God than it did about the character of the physical universe. His solution to the Newtonian challenge was a strong dose of philosophical idealism: “that which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws” (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 344).
Edwards's ethics showed the same concern for establishing God as the foundation. Behavior that was moral in the strictest sense of the term arose, in his view, only from a heart regenerated by God's mercy. This case was made fully in The Nature of True Virtue, which was published posthumously in 1765, but it was also a persistent theme in much of his other work. Edwards agreed with contemporary British moralists like Francis Hutcheson that humans possessed a natural capacity for recognizing morality and following the internal “moral sense.” But he also contended that this kind of morality was inevitably prudential, pragmatic, and, ultimately an expression of self-love. Such socially useful behavior fell far short of true virtue, since “‘tis evident that true virtue must chiefly consist in love to God, the Being of beings, infinitely the greatest and best of beings” (Ethical Writings, 550).
Soon after Edwards died, his intellectual descendents turned away from the affectional idealism of his philosophy to forms of common sense realism. In the mid-nineteenth century the New York Presbyterian, Henry Boynton Smith, wrote one of the best accounts ever of the wide-ranging implications of that move (in an essay on Nathaniel Emmons in Smith’s book Faith and Philosophy). But now I’m back to history when the point of this mini-essay is to introduce Jonathan Edwards’s philosophy, a subject which is more than enough in its own right.
Professor Mark Noll is a leading scholar of American religion. He has written many books, including America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 2002) and The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Intervarsity Press, 2004).
America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark Noll
• The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys by Mark Noll
• Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George Marsden
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