Jonathan
Edwards
Benjamin
B. Warfield, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 1912
JONATHAN EDWARDS, saint and metaphysician,
revivalist and theologian, stands out as the one figure of real greatness in
the intellectual life of colonial America. Born, bred, passing his whole life
on the verge of civilization, he has made his voice heard wherever men have
busied themselves with those two greatest topics which can engage human thought
- God and the soul. A French philosopher of scant sympathy with Edwards' chief
concernment writes:
There are few names of the eighteenth
century which have obtained such celebrity as that of Jonathan Edwards. Critics
and historians down to our own day have praised in dithyrambic terms the
logical vigor and the constructive powers of a writer whom they hold (as is
done by Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, Robert Hall, even Fiechte) to be the
greatest metaphysician America has yet produced. Who knows, they have asked
themselves, to what heights this original genius might have risen, if, instead
of being born in a half-savage country, far from the traditions of philosophy
and science, he had appeared rather in our old world, and there received the
direct impulse of the modern mind. Perhaps he would have taken a place between
Leibniz and Kant among the founders of immortal systems, instead of the work he
has left reducing itself to a sublime and barbarous theology, which astonishes
our reason and outrages our heart, the object of at once our horror and
admiration.
Edwards' greatness is not, however, thus
rnerely conjectural. He was no “mute, inglorious Milton,” but the most
articulate of men. Nor is it as a metaphysician that he makes his largest claim
upon our admiration, subtle metaphysician as he showed himself to be. His
ontological speculations, on which his title to recognition as a metaphysician
mainly rests, belong to his extreme youth, and had been definitely put behind
him at an age when most men first begin to probe such problems. It was, as Lyon
indeed suggests, to theology that he gave his mature years and his most
prolonged and searching thought, especially to the problems of sin and
salvation. And these problems were approached by him not as purely theoretical,
but as intensely practical ones. Therefore he was a man of action as truly as a
man of thought, and powerfully wrought on his age, setting at work energies
which have not yet spent their force. He is much more accurately characterized.
therefore, by a philosopher of our own, who is as little in sympathy, however,
with his main interests as Lyon himself. F J. E. Woodbridge says:
He was distinctly a great man. He did not
merely express the thought of his tune, or meet it simply in the spirit of his
traditions. He stemmed it and molded it. New England thought was already making
toward that colorless theology which marked it later. That he checked. It was
decidedly Arminian. He made it Calvinistic… His time does not explain him.
Edwards had a remarkable philosophical bent;
but he had an even more remarkable sense and taste for divine things. and,
therefore (so Woodbridge concludes, with at least relative justice), "we
remember him, not as the greatest of American philosophers. but as the greatest
of American Calvinists."
I. THE PERIOD OF EDWARDS' PREPARATION
It was a very decadent New England into
which Edwards was born, on 5th October 1703. The religious fervor which the'
Puritan immigrants had brought with them into the New World had not been able
to propagate itself unimpaired to the third and fourth generation. Already in
1678, Increase Mather had bewailed that “the body of the rising generation is a
poor, perishing, unconverted, and (except the Lord pour down His Spirit) an
undone generation.” There were general influences operative throughout Christendom
at this epoch, depressing to the life of the spirit, which were not unfelt in
New England; and these were reinforced there by the hardness of the conditions
of existence in a raw land. Everywhere thinking and living alike were moving on
a lowered plane; not merely spirituality but plain morality was suffering some
eclipse. The churches felt compelled to recede from the high ideals which had
been their heritage, and were introducing into their membership and admitting
to their mysteries men who, though decent in life, made no profession of a
change of heart. If only they had been themselves baptized, they were
encouraged to offer their children for baptism (under the so-called “Half-Way
Covenant”), and to come themselves to the Table of the Lord (conceived as a
“converting ordinance”). The household into which Edwards was born, however,
not only protected him from much of the evil which was pervading the community,
but powerfully stimulated his spiritual and intellectual life. He began the
study of Latin at the age of six, and by thirteen had acquired a respectable
knowledge of “the three learned languages” which at the time formed part of the
curricula of the colleges - Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Before he had completed
his thirteenth year (September 1716), he entered the “Collegiate School of
Connecticut” (afterwards Yale College). During his second year at college he
fell in with Locke's “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” and had more
satisfaction and pleasure in studying it, he tells us himself, “than the most
greedy miser finds, when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold, from some
newly discovered treasure.” He graduated at the head of his class in 1720, when
he was just short of seventeen years of age, but remained at college (as the
custom of the time was) two years longer (to the summer of 1722) for the study
of Divinity. In the summer of 1722 he was “approbated” to preach, and from
August 1722 until April 1723 he supplied the pulpit of a little knot of
Presbyterians in New York City. Returning home, he was appointed tutor at Yale
in June 1724, and filled this post with distinguished ability, during a most
trying period in the life of the college, for the next two years (until
September 1726). His resignation of his tutorship was occasioned by an
invitation to become the colleague and successor of his grandfather, Solomon
Stoddard, in the pastorate of the church at Northampton, Mass., where,
accordingly, he was ordained and in-stalled on 15th February 1727.
By his installation at Northampton, Edwards'
period of preparation was brought to a close. His preparation had been
remarkable, both intensively and extensively. Born with a drop of ink in his
veins, Edwards had almost from infancy held a pen in his hand. From his
earliest youth he had been accustomed to trace out on paper to its last
consequence every fertile thought which came to him. A number of the early
products of his observation and reflection have been preserved, revealing a
precocity which is almost beyond belief.
It is in these youthful writings that
Edwards propounds spiritualistic metaphysics, and it is chiefly on the strength
of them that he holds a place in our histories of philosophy. His whole system
is already present in substance in the essay . “Of Being,” which was written before
he was sixteen years of age. And, though there is no reason to believe that he
ever renounced the opinions set forth in these youthful discussions - there
are, on the contrary, occasional suggestions, even in latest writings, that
they still lurked at the back of his brain - he never formally reverts to them
subsequently to Yale period (up to 1727). His engagement with such topics
belongs, therefore, distinctively to his formative period, fore he became
engrossed with the duties of the active ministry and the lines of thought more
immediately called into exercise by them. In these early years, certainly
independently of Berkeley, and apparently with no suggestion from outside
beyond what might be derived from Newton's explanations of light and color, and
Locke's treatment of sensation as the source of ideas, he worked out for
himself a complete system of Idealism, which trembled indeed on the brink of
mere phenomenalism, and might have betrayed him into Pantheism save for the
intensity of his perception of the living God. “Speaking most strictly,” he
declares, “there is no proper substance but God Himself.” The universe exists
“nowhere but in the Divine mind.” Whether this is true “with respect to bodies
only,” or of finite spirits as well, he seems at first to have wavered;
ultimately he came to the more inclusive opinion.
Edwards was not so absorbed in such
speculations as to neglect the needs of his spirit. Throughout all these
formative years he remained first of all a man of religion. He had been the
subject of deep religious impressions from his earliest boyhood, and he gave
himself, during this period of preparation, to the most assiduous and intense
cultivation of his religious nature. “I made seeking my salvation,” he himself
tells us, “the main business of my life.” But about the time of his graduation
(1720) a change came over him, which relieved the strain of his inward
distress. From his childhood, his mind had revolted against the sovereignty of
God: “it used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.” Now all this passed
unobservedly away; and gradually, by a process he could not trace, this very
doctrine came to be not merely a matter of course to him but a matter of
rejoicing: “The doctrine has very often appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright,
and sweet; absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God.” One day he
was reading I Tim. 1: 17, “Now unto the King, eternal, immortal, invisible, the
only wise God, be honor and glory, for ever and ever, Amen,” and, as he read,
“a sense of the glory of the Divine Being” took possession of him, “a new
sense, quite different from anything” he “ever experienced before.” He longed
to be “rapt up to Him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in Him for
ever.” From that moment his understanding of divine things increased, and his
enjoyment of God grew. There were, no doubt, intervals of depression. But, on
the whole, his progress was steadily upwards and his consecration more and more
complete. It was this devout young man, with the joy of the Lord in his heart,
who turned his back in the early months of 1727 on his brilliant academic life
and laid aside forever his philosophical speculations, to take up the work of a
pastor at Northampton.
II. EDWARDS THE PASTOR
Edwards was ordained co-pastor with his
grandfather on 15th February 1727, and on the latter's death, two years later,
succeeded to the sole charge of the parish. Northampton was relatively a very
important place. It was the county town, and nearly half of the area of the
province lay within the county. It was, therefore, a sort of little local
capital, and its people prided themselves on their culture, energy, and
independence of mind. There was but the one church in the town, and it was
probably the largest and most influential in the province, outside of Boston.
It was not united in sentiment, being often torn with factional disputes. But,
under the strong preaching of Solomon Stoddard, it had been repeatedly visited
with revivals. These periods of awakening continued at intervals during Edwards'
pastorate; the church became famous for them, and its membership was filled up
by them. At one time the membership numbered six hundred and twenty, and
included nearly the entire adult population of the town. Stoddard had been the
protagonist for the later views of admission to Church-ordinances, and early in
the century had introduced into the Northampton church the practice of opening
the Lord's Supper to those who made no profession of conversion. In this
practice Edwards at first acquiesced; but, becoming convinced that it was
wrong, sought after a while to correct it, with disastrous consequences to
himself. Meanwhile it had given to the membership of the church something of
the character of a mixed multitude, which the circumstance that large numbers
of them had been introduced in the religious excitement of revivals had tended
to increase.
To the pastoral care of this important
congregation, Edwards gave himself with single-hearted devotion. Assiduous
house-to-house visitation did not, it is true, form part of his plan of work;
but this did not argue carelessness or neglect; it was in accordance with his
deliberate judgment of his special gifts and fitnesses. And, if he did not go
to his people in their homes, save at the call of illness or special need, he
encouraged them to come freely to him, and grudged neither time nor labor in
meeting their individual requirements. He remained, of course, also a student,
spending ordinarily from thirteen to fourteen hours daily in his study. This
work did not separate itself from, but was kept strictly subsidiary to, his
pastoral service. Not only had he turned his back definitely on the purely
academic speculations which had engaged him so deeply at Yale, but he produced
no purely theological works during the whole of his twenty-three years'
pastorate at Northampton. His publications during this period, besides sermons,
consisted only of treatises in practical Divinity. They deal principally with
problems raised by the great religious awakenings in which his preaching was
fruitful.
It was in his sermons that Edwards' studies
bore their richest fruit. He did not spare himself in his public
instruction. He not only faithfully filled the regular appointments of the
church, but freely undertook special discourses and lectures, and during times
of “attention to religion” went frequently to the aid of the neighboring
churches. From the first he was recognized as a remarkable preacher, as
arresting and awakening as he was instructive. Filled himself with the profoundest
sense of the heinousness of sin, as an offense against the majesty of God and
an outrage of His love, he set himself to arouse his hearers to some
realization of the horror of their condition as objects of the divine
displeasure, and of the incredible goodness of God in intervening for their
salvation. Side by side with the most moving portrayal of God's love in Christ,
and of the blessedness of communion with Him, he therefore set, with the most
startling effect, equally vivid pictures of the dangers of unforgiven sin and
the terrors of the lost estate. The effect of such preaching, delivered with
the force of the sincerest conviction, was overwhelming. A great awakening
began in the church at the end of 1735, in which more than three hundred converts
were gathered in, and which extended throughout the churches of the Connecticut
valley. In connection with a visit from Whitefield in 1740 another wave of
religious fervor was started, which did not spend its force until it covered
the whole land. No one could recognize more fully than Edwards the evil that
mixes with the good in such seasons of religious excitement. He diligently
sought to curb excesses, and earnestly endeavored to separate the chaff from
the wheat. But no one could protest more strongly against casting out the wheat
with the chaff. He subjected all the phenomena of the revivals in which he
participated to the most searching analytical study; and, while sadly
acknowledging that much self-deception was possible. and that the rein could only
too readily be given to false "enthusiasm” he earnestly contended that a
genuine work of grace might find expression in mental and even physical
excitement. It was one of the incidental fruits of these revivals that, as we
have seen, he gave to the world in a series of studies perhaps the most
thorough examination of the phenomena of religious excitement it has yet
received, and certainly, in his great treatise on the "Religious
Affections," one of the most complete systems of what has been strikingly
called "spiritual diagnostics" it possesses.
For twenty-three years Edwards pursued his
fruitful ministry at Northampton; under his guidance the church became a city
set on a hill to which all eyes were turned. But in the reaction from the
revival of 1741-1742 conditions arose which caused him great searching's of
heart, and led ultimately to his separation from his congregation. In this
revival, practically the whole adult population of the town was brought into
the church; they were admitted under the excitement of the time and under a
ruling introduced as long before as 1704 by Stoddard, which looked upon all the
ordinances of the church, including the Lord's Supper, as "converting
ordinances," not presupposing, but adapted to bring about, a change of
heart.
As time passed, it became evident enough
that a considerable body of the existing membership of the church had not
experienced that change of heart by which alone they could be constituted
Christians, and indeed they made no claim to have done so. On giving serious
study to the question for himself, Edwards became convinced that participation
in the Lord's Supper could properly be allowed only to those professing real
"conversion." It was his duty as pastor and guide of his people to
guard the Lord's Table from profanation, and he was not a man to leave
unperformed a duty clearly perceived. Two obvious measures presented themselves
to him - unworthy members of the church must be exscinded by discipline, and
greater care must be exercised in receiving new applicants for membership. No
doubt discipline was among the functions which the Church claimed to exercise;
but the practice of it had fallen much into decay as a sequence to the lowered
conception which had come to be entertained of the requirements for church
membership. The door of admission to the Lord's Supper, on the other hand, had
been formally set wide open; and this loose policy had been persisted in for
half a century, and had become traditional. What Edwards felt himself compelled
to undertake, it will be seen, was a return in theory and practice to the
original platform of the Congregational churches, which conceived the Church to
be, in the strictest sense of the words, "a company of saints by
calling," among whom there should be permitted to enter nothing that was
not clean. This, which should have been his strength, and which ultimately gave
the victory to the movement which he inaugurated throughout the churches of New
England, was in his own personal case his weakness. It gave a radical appearance
to the reforms which he advocated, which he himself was far from giving to
them. It is not necessary to go into the details of the controversy regarding a
case of discipline. which emerged in 1744, or the subsequent difficulties
(l748-1749) regarding the conditions of admission to the Lord's Supper. The
result was that. after a sharp contest running through two years, Edwards was
dismissed from his pastorate on 22nd June 1750.
III. EDWARDS THE THEOLOGIAN
By his dismissal from his church at Northampton.
in his forty-seventh year, the second period of Edwards' life - the period of
strenuous pastoral labor - was brought to an abrupt close. After a few months
he removed to the little frontier hamlet (there were only twelve white families
resident there) of Stockbridge, as missionary of the "Society in London
for Propagating the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent" to the
Housatonic Indians gathered there, and as pastor of the little church of white
settlers. In this exile he hoped to find leisure to write, in defense of the
Calvinistic system against the rampant "Arminianism" of the day, the
works which he had long had in contemplation, and for which he had made large
preparation. Peace and quiet he did not find; he was embroiled fr6m the first
in a trying struggle against the greed and corruption of the administrators of
the funds designed for the benefit of the Indians. But he made, if he could not
find, the requisite leisure. It was at Stockbridge that he wrote the treatises
on which his fame as a theologian chiefly rests: the great works on the Will
(written in 1753, published in 1754), and Original Sin (in the press
when he died, 1758), the striking essays on "The End for which God
created the World," and the "Nature of True Virtue"
(published 1765, after his death), and the unfinished "History of
Redemption"(published 1772). No doubt he utilized for these works
material previously collected. He lived practically with his pen in his hand,
and accumulated an immense amount of written matter - his "best
thoughts," as it has been felicitously called. The work on the Will,
indeed, had itself been long on the stocks. We find him making diligent studies
for it already at the opening of 1747; and, though his work on it was
repeatedly interrupted for long intervals, he tells us that before he left
Northampton he "had made considerable preparation, and was deeply engaged
in the prosecution of this design." The rapid completion of the book in
the course of a few months in 1753 was not, therefore, so wonderful a feat as
it might otherwise appear. Nevertheless, it is the seven years at Stockbridge
which deserve to be called the fruitful years of Edwards' theological work.
They were interrupted in the autumn of 1757 by an invitation to him to become
the President of the College of New Jersey, at Princeton, in succession to his
son-in-law, Aaron Burr. It was with great reluctance that he accepted this
call; it seemed to him to threaten the prevention of what he had thought to
make his life-work - the preparation, to wit, of a series of volumes on all the
several parts of the Arminian controversy. But the college at Princeton, which
had been founded and thus far carried on by men whose sympathies were with the
warm-hearted, revivalistic piety to which his own life had been dedicated, had
claims upon him which he could not disown. On the advice of a council of his
friends, therefore, he accepted the call ,and removed to Princeton to take up
his new duties, in January 1758. There he was inoculated for smallpox on 13th
February, and died of this disease on 22d March in the fifty-fifth year of his
age.
The peculiarity of Edwards' theological work
is due to the union in it of the richest religious sentiment with the highest
intellectual powers. He was first of all a man of faith, and it is this that
gives its character to his whole life and all its products; but his strong
religious feeling had at its disposal a mental force and logical acuteness of
the first order; he was at once deeply emotional, and, as Ezra Stiles called
him, a "strong reasoner." His analytical subtlety has probably never
been surpassed; but with it was combined a broad grasp of religious truth which
enabled him to see it as a whole, and to deal with its several parts without
exaggeration and with a sense of their relations in the system. The system to
which he gave his sincere adhesion, and to the defense of which, against the
tendencies which were in his day threatening to undermine it, he consecrated
all his powers, was simply Calvinism. From this system as it had been expounded
by its chief representatives he did not consciously depart in any of its
constitutive elements. The breadth and particularity of his acquaintance with
it in its classical expounders, and the completeness of his adoption of it in
his own thought, are frequently underestimated. There is a true sense in which
he was a man of thought rather than of learning. There were no great libraries
accessible in Western Massachusetts in the middle of the eighteenth century.
His native disposition to reason out for himself the subjects which were
presented to his thought was reinforced by his habits of study; it was his
custom to develop on paper, to its furthest logical consequences, every topic
of importance to which his attention was directed. He lived in the "age of
reason," and was in this respect a true child of his time.- In the task
which he undertook, furthermore, an appeal to authority would have been
useless; it was uniquely to the court of reason that he could hale the
adversaries of the Calvinistic system. Accordingly it is only in his more
didactic - as distinguished from controversial - treatise on "Religious
Affections," that Edwards cites with any frequency earlier writers in
support of his positions. The reader must guard himself, however, from the
illusion that Edwards was not himself conscious of the support of earlier
writers beneath him. His acquaintance with the masters of the system of thought
he was defending, for example, was wide and minute. Amesius and Wollebius had
been his textbooks at college. The well selected library at Yale, we may be
sure, had been thoroughly explored by him; at the close of his divinity
studies, he speaks of the reading of "doctrinal books or books of
controversy" as if it were part of his daily business. As would have been
expected, he fed himself on the great Puritan divines, and formed not merely
his thought but his life upon them. We find him in his youth, for instance,
diligently using Manton's "Sermons on the 119th Psalm "as a spiritual
guide; and in his rare allusions to authorities in his works, he betrays
familiarity with such writers as William Perkins, John Preston, Thomas Blake,
Anthony Burgess, Stephen Charnock, John Flavel, Theophilus Gale, Thomas
Goodwin, John Owen, Samuel Rutherford, Thomas Shephard, Richard Sibbes, John
Smith the Platonist, and Samuel Clark the Arian. Even his contemporaries he
knew and estimated at their true values: Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge as a
matter of course; and also Thomas Boston, the scheme of thought of whose
"View of the Covenant of Grace" he confessed he did not understand,
but whose "Fourfold State of Man" he "liked exceedingly well.”
His Calvin he certainly knew thoroughly, though he would not swear in his
words; and also his Turretin, whom he speaks of as "the great
Turretine"; while van Mastricht he declares "much better" than
even Turretin, "or," he adds with some fervor, "than any other
book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion”. The close agreement of
his teaching with that of the best esteemed Calvinistic divines is, therefore,
both conscious and deliberate; his omission to appeal to them does not argue
either ignorance or contempt; it is incident to his habitual manner and to the
special task he was prosecuting. In point of fact, what he teaches is just the
"standard " Calvinism in its completeness.
As an independent thinker, he is, of course,
not without his individualisms, and that in conception no less than in
expression. His explanation of the identity of the human race with its Head,
founded as it is on a doctrine of personal identity which reduces it to an
" arbitrary constitution " of God, binding its successive moments
together, is peculiar to himself. In answering objections to the doctrine of
Original Sin, he appeals at one point to Stapfer, and speaks, after him, in the
language of that form of doctrine known as "mediate imputation." But
this is only in order to illustrate his own view that all mankind are one as
truly as and by the same kind of divine constitution that an individual life is
one in its consecutive moments. Even in this immediate context he does not
teach the doctrine of "mediate imputation," insisting rather that,
Adam and his posterity being in the strictest sense one, in them no less than
in him " the guilt arising from the first existing of a depraved
disposition" cannot at all be distinguished from ''the guilt of Adam's
first sin”, and elsewhere throughout the treatise he speaks in the terms of the
common Calvinistic doctrine. His most marked individualism, however, lay in the
region of philosophy rather than of theology. In an essay on "The Nature
of True Virtue." he develops, in opposition to the view that all virtue
may be reduced ultimately to self-love, an eccentric theory of virtue as consisting
in love to being in general. But of this again we hear nothing elsewhere in his
works, though it became germinal for the New England theology of the next age.
Such individualisms in any case arc in no way characteristic of his teaching.
lie strove after no show of originality. An independent thinker he certainly
claimed to be, and "utterly disclaimed a dependence," say, "on
Calvin," in the sense of "believing the doctrines he held because
Calvin believed and taught them." This very disclaimer is, however, a
proclamation of agreement with Calvin, though not as if he "believed
everything just as Calvin taught"; he is only solicitous that he should be
understood to be not a blind follower of Calvin, but a convinced defender of
Calvinism. His one concern was, accordingly, not to improve on the Calvinism of
the great expounders of the system, but to place the main elements of the
Calvinistic system, as commonly understood, beyond cavil. His marvelous
invention was employed, therefore, only in the discovery and development of the
fullest and most convincing possible array of arguments in their favor. This is
true even of his great treatise on the Will. This is, in the common judgment,
the greatest of all his treatises, and the common judgment here is right. But
the doctrine of this treatise is precisely the doctrine of the Calvinistic
schoolmen. "The novelty of the treatise," we have been well told long
ago, "lies not in the position it takes and defends, but in the multitude
of proofs, the fecundity and urgency of the arguments by which he maintains
it." Edwards' originality thus consists less in the content of his thought
than in his manner of thinking. He enters into the great tradition which had
come down to him, and "infuses it with his personality and makes it
live," and "the vitality of his thought gives to its product the
value of a unique creation." The effect of Edwards' labors was quite in
the line of his purpose, and not disproportionate to his greatness. The
movement against Calvinism which was overspreading the land was in a great
measure checked, and the elimination of Calvinism as a determining factor in
the thought of New England, which seemed to be imminent as he wrote, was
postponed for more than a hundred years.
IV. THE NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY (It's Decline)
It was Edwards' misfortune that he gave his
name to a party; and to a party which, never in perfect agreement with him in
its doctrinal ideas, finished by becoming the earnest advocate of (as it has
been sharply expressed) "a set of opinions which he gained his chief
celebrity in demolishing." The affiliation of this party with Edwards was
very direct. "Bellamy . . and Hopkins," says G. P. Fisher, tracing
the descent, "were pupils of Edwards; from Hopkins, West derived his
theology; Smalley studied with Bellamy, and Emmons with Smalley." But the
inheritance of the party from Edwards showed itself much more strongly on the
practical than on the doctrinal side. Its members were the heirs of his
revivalist zeal and of his awakening preaching; they also imitated his attempt
to purify the Church by discipline and strict guarding of the Lord's Table in a
word, to restore the Church to its Puritan ideal of a congregation of saints.
Pressing to extremes in both matters, as followers will, the
"Edwardeans" or "New Divinity" men became a ferment in the
churches of New England, and, creating discussion and disturbances everywhere,
gradually won their way to dominance. Meanwhile their doctrinal teaching was
continually suffering change. As Fisher puts it, "in the process of
defending the established faith, they were led to recast it in new forms and to
change its aspect." Only, it was not merely the form and aspect of their
inherited faith, but its substance, that they were steadily transforming.
Accordingly, Fisher proceeds to explain that what on this side constituted
their common character was not so much a common doctrine as a common method:
"the fact that their views were the result of independent reflection and
were maintained on philosophical grounds." Here, too, they were followers
of Edwards; but in their exaggeration of his rational method, without his solid
grounding in the history of thought, they lost continuity with the past and
became the creators of a "New England theology "which it is only
right frankly to describe as provincial.
It is a far cry from Jonathan Edwards the
Calvinist, defending with all the force of his unsurpassed reasoning powers the
doctrine of a determined will, and commending a theory of virtue which
identified it with general benevolence, to Nathaniel W. Taylor the
Pelagianizer, building his system upon the doctrine of the power to the
contrary as its foundation stone, and reducing all virtue ultimately to
self-love. Taylor's teaching, in point of fact, was in many respects the exact
antipodes of Edwards', and very fairly reproduced the congeries of tendencies
which the latter considered it his life-work to withstand. Yet Taylor looked
upon himself as an "Edwardsean," though in him the outcome of the
long development received its first appropriate designation - the "New
Haven Divinity." Its several successive phases were bound together by the
no doubt external circumstance that they were taught in general by men who had
received their training at New Haven.
The growth of the New Divinity to that
dominance in the theological thought of New England from which it derives its
claim to be called "the New England Theology" was gradual, though
somewhat rapid. Samuel Hopkins tells us that at the beginning - in 1756 - there
were not more than four or five "who espoused the sentiments which since
have been called 'Edwardsean,' and 'New Divinity'; and since, after some
improvement was made upon them, 'Hopkintonian.' or 'Hopkinsian'
sentiments." The younger Edwards still spoke of them in 1777 as a small
party. In 1787, Ezra Stiles, chafing under their growing influence and marking
the increasing divergence of views among themselves, fancied he saw their end
approaching. In this he was mistaken: the New Divinity, in the person of
Timothy Dwight, succeeded him as President of Yale College, and through a long
series of years was infused into generation after generation of students. The
“confusions” Stiles observed were, however, real or, rather, the progressive giving
way of the so-called Edwardeans to those tendencies of thought to which they
were originally set in opposition. The younger Edwards drew up a careful
account of what he deemed the (ten) “Improvements in Theology made by
President Edwards and those who have followed his course of thought.” Three of
the most of these he does not pretend were introduced by Edwards, attributing
them simply to those whom he calls Edwards' “followers.” These are the
substitution of the Governmental (Grotian) for the Satisfaction doctrine of the
Atonement, in the accomplishment of which he himself, with partial forerunners
in Bellamy and West, was the chief agent; the discarding of the doctrine of the
imputation of sin in favor of the view that men are condemned for their own personal
sin only - a contention which was made in an extreme form by Nathaniel Emmons,
who confined all moral quality to acts of volition, and afterwards became a
leading element in Nathaniel W. Taylor's system; and the perversion of Edwards'
distinction between “natural” and “moral” inability so as to ground on the
“natural” ability of the unregenerate, after the fashion introduced by Samuel
Hopkins - a theory of the capacities and duties of men without the Spirit,
which afterwards, in the hands of Nathaniel W. Taylor, became the core of a new
Pelagianizing system.
The external victory of the New Divinity in
New England was marked doubtless by the election of Timothy Dwight to the
Presidency of Yale College (1795); and certainly it could have found no one
better fitted to commend it to moderate men; probably no written system of
theology has ever enjoyed wider acceptance than Dwight's "Sermons."
But after Dwight came Taylor, and in the teaching of the latter the downward
movement of the New Divinity ran out into a system which turned, as on its
hinge, upon the Pelagianizing doctrines of the native sinlessness of the race,
the plenary ability of the sinner to renovate his own soul, and self-love or
the desire for happiness as the spring of all voluntary action. From this
extreme some reaction was inevitable, and the history of the so-called “New
England Theology” closes with the moderate reaction of the teaching of Edwards
A. Park. Park was of that line of theological descent which came through
Hopkins, Emmons, and Woods; but he sought to incorporate into his system all
that seemed to him to be the results of New England thinking for the century
which preceded him, not excepting the extreme positions of Taylor himself.
Reverting so far from Taylor as to return to perhaps a somewhat more
deterministic doctrine of the will, he was able to rise above Taylor in his
doctrines of election and regeneration, and to give to the general type of
thought which he represented a lease of life for another generation. But, with
the death of Park in 1900, the history of “New England Theology” seems to come
to an end.
From the Works of Benjamin B. Warfield,
Volume IX (Studies in Theology) pp.515-538