About Edwards
Jonathan Edwards : Theologian
The following is a brief excerpt from E. Brooks Holifield's Theology In America on the theology of Jonathan Edwards.
ProfessorHolifield is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of American ChurchHistory at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He is theauthor of several books, including the widely acclaimed Theology In America, which is now available from Yale University Press.
"Intypical New England Calvinist fashion, Jonathan Edwards definedtheology as `the doctrine of living to God by Christ.' In many otherways, Edwards was a typical New England theologian, a Calvinistconcerned about piety in a local congregation. Yet no other theologianin America would equal him in intellectual depth or enduring influenceof generations of successors. For a hundred years after his death,competing schools of theology either struggled for his mantle or stroveto overcome his logic. He never lacked for critics: Arminians of everyvariety would continue to view him as a monumental defender ofCalvinist error while some conservative Calvinists would long view histheology as a source of heresy. His admirers, however, formed anEdwardean theological culture that entrenched itself in the leadingReformed seminaries of the nation even as some of them craftedtheological revisions that Edwards would never have accepted.
Edwardsdrew the common distinction between the two kinds of theologicalknowledge, the first speculative, derived from the exercise of theunderstanding, and the second practical, consisting of the `sense ofthe heart,' the gracious inclination of both the understanding and thewill. The aim of theology was to nurture a `sense' of divine thingsthat took one deeper into their nature than the speculativeunderstanding alone could penetrate and to `guide and influence us inour practice.' His favorite text in systematic theology was the Theoretico-Practica Theologia ofthe Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706)--a teacher atUtrecht in the Netherlands from 1677 until his death--who made a pointof showing that every speculative truth in theology had a practicalimplication. Just as Edwards strove to overcome a sharp distinctionbetween the will and the understanding, so he tried also to ensure aclose linkage between the speculative and the practical. A `speculativeknowledge' was of `infinite importance' for without it there could beno `practical knowledge.'...
Heentertained no doubts about either the value of rationality or therationality of theology. Edwards wrote about moral philosophy,metaphysics, atomist theory, optics, the corpuscular theory of light,and the nature of gravity. In essays written when he was a student atYale between 1716 and 1720, he displayed a knowledge of Newtonianscience, and his reading of John Locke, probably when he was a tutor atthe college, confirmed an interest in philosophy that went back to hisundergraduate years. In 1729 he began to think about writing a`Rational Account' of all the `Main Doctrines of the ChristianReligion,' and in the mid-1740's he projected a book to `shew how allthe arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issuein divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be as parts of it.'Theology for Edwards remained the highest expression of rationality,though he also though that it offered the clearest insights intoreason's limits.
While some read him chiefly as a philosophicaltheologian, immersed in the conversation with Locke, Malebranche, theCambridge Platonists, or the British moralists, others, like his firstbiographer Samuel Hopkins, emphasized that he `studied the Bible morethan all other books' and that his most frequent recourse as atheologian was to such works of biblical criticism as Matthew Poole's Synopsis Criticorum (1669-76) and Matthew Henry's Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1708-10).In response especially to the deists, he occupied himself with thecritical study of scripture, writing on inspiration; the scope of thecanon; authorship of biblical texts, including the Mosaic authorship ofthe Pentateuch; and the historicity of biblical reports. He was, infact, both a philosophical and a biblical theologian, and for him thesetwo sides of theology coincided. Both as a philosopher and an exegete,he sought to preserve Calvinist orthodoxy, including the standardCalvinist balance between reason and revelation. Nevertheless, herecast conventional categories, and his vision of divine `excellency'inspired a way of thinking that shaped his views of rationality,ethics, metaphysics, biblical interpretation, and the meaning of thepracticality of theology."[1]
[1] Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 102-104.
* Theology In America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War by Brooks Holifield
* The Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Conrad Cherry
* The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Sang Hyun Lee
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