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God the Measure: Towards an Understanding of Jonathan Edwards' Theocentric Metaphysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Michael J. McClymond
Michael J. McClymond
Affiliation:
Westmont College955 La Paz Rd Santa Barbara, CA 93108
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Extract

Since Perry Millerpos;'s biography of Jonathan Edwards began a new cycle of study some forty years ago, research into Edwards' life and thought has advanced considerably. No longer is the intellectual giant of colonial America surrounded by the obscurity to which early generations had consigned him. Yale is republishing his works. New secondary studies on Edwards appear regularly. Academics from a range of disciplines - history, American studies, theology, philosophy, and literary criticism - have all made Edwards a focus for serious scholarly attention. As an index to the quickening tempo of research, the total number of dissertations on Edwards increased in geometrical proportion during the last half century, doubling during each of the successive decades since 1940.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 43 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1994

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References

1 Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards, The American Men of Letters Series (New York: William Sloane, 1949)Google Scholar.

2 Lesser, M.X., jonathan Edwards: A Reference Guide (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981), p. xliGoogle Scholar. This work provides the best available listing of secondary literature on Edwards.

3 The terminology of ‘fundamental motif’ derives of course from Anders Nygren. See Agape and Eros (rev. ed., translated by Watson, Philip S.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953; p. 35)Google Scholar where Nygren explains it as ‘the basic idea or the driving power of the religion concerned, or what it is that gives it its character asa whole and communicates to all its parts their special content and colour’.

4 Cherry, Conrad, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar; Elwood, Douglas, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Fiering, Norman, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Lee, Sang, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Delattre seems to have claimed Edwards' notion of beauty as a sort of ‘fundamental motif’, saying that ‘the aesthetic aspect of Jonathan Edwards' thought and vision … provides a larger purchase on the essential and distinctive features of his thought than does any other aspect’ (Beauty, p. vii).

5 Cherry, , Theology, p. 7.Google Scholar

6 The most thorough analysis of Edwards' metaphysics to date is Wallace E. Anderson, ‘Editor's Introduction’, in Edwards, Jonathan, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 6 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 1–143.Google Scholar

7 Jenson, Robert W., America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 22Google Scholar. Others have noted this same feature of Edwards' thought. Paul Ramsey says: ‘He is nothing if not ontological and theological or biblical at the same time’ (‘Editor's Introduction’, in Edwards, Jonathan, Ethical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8 [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989], p. 22Google Scholar). And James Orr comments: ‘Philosophy to him was at no time an end in itself, but was valued only as it led back to, or had relations with, God and religion.’ And conversely,‘… religion, as it moves back on ultimate questions, always becomes to him again a kind of philosophy; is lifted up into a region of more or less lofty speculation’ (The Influence of Edwards', in Exercises Commemorating [full reference below, n. 11], p. 114).

8 ‘The Mind’ is unquestionably the locus classicus for a study of Edwards' metaphysics. At the same time a study of Edwards' metaphysics cannot confine itself to ‘The Mind’, inasmuch as he returned again and again to metaphysics in the later published works and the still unpublished ‘Miscellanies’. ‘The Mind’ has been republished, with extensive notes and expert commentary by Anderson, Wallace E., in Edwards, Jonathan, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 6 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 313–393.Google Scholar

9 Elwood, , Philosophical Theology, p. 11.Google Scholar

10 Parrington, V.L., Main Currents of American Thought (New York, 1927, 1:252)Google Scholar; quoted in May, Henry B., ‘Jonathan Edwards and America’, in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, edited by Hatch, Nathan O. and Stout, Harry S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 30.Google Scholar

11 Smyth, Egbert, ‘The Theology of Edwards’, in Platner, John Winthrop, ed., Exercises Commemorating the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Platner, John Winthrop (Andover, Massachusetts: Andover Press, 1904), p. 79Google Scholar.

12 Schafer, Thomas, ‘Edwards, Jonathan’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edn. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1986), 4 (Micropedia): 381–382Google Scholar.

13 Edwards, , The Works of Jonathan Edwards, in 2 vols. (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1984 [1834]), 2:3.Google Scholar

14 Edwards, , Ethical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 8; edited by Ramsey, Paul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 405–536Google Scholar.

15 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 363.Google Scholar

16 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 345. cf. Is. 45:5, 14, 18, 21, 22.Google Scholar

17 Analogously for Barth, ‘the supreme problem of theology is not the existence of God, as natural theology supposes, but the independent existence of creaturely reality’ (Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F., ‘Editor's Preface’, in Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics III/I [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958], p. vii)Google Scholar.

18 Niebuhr, H. Richard, ‘Value Theory and Theology’, p. 174Google Scholar quoted in Ramsey, Paul, ‘The Transformation of Ethics’, in Faith and Ethics: The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr, edited by Ramsey, Paul (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 143Google Scholar. The second quotation is Ramsey's own comment, p. 143.

19 For Barth's treatment of the Creator's ‘affirmation’ of the creature, see Church Dogmatics, III/1, pp. 344–345.Google Scholar

20 cf. Augustine, ‘Wherever we taste the truth, God is there’ (Confessions 4.12).

21 Edwards, , Ethical Writings, p. 441.Google Scholar

22 Edwards, , Ethical Writings, pp. 550–551.Google Scholar

23 One textual feature of ‘The Mind’, which seems hitherto to have passed unnoticed, is the presence of the ‘corollaries’ in which Edwards at the end of the entries draws out further conclusions from his preceding reasoning. In all, ‘The Mind’ contains eighteen such references (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp.338, 341, 342, 343, 345, 351, 352, 355, 361, 362, 381, 382, 385). Commonly, though not invariably, these ‘corollaries’ encapsulate the theological significance of the foregoing discussions. A notable instance is the paper ‘Of Atoms’, which proceeds much like any 18th century scientific treatise, lettered diagrams and all, and then suddenly in its ‘corollaries’ explodes into such theological declarations as that ‘it is God himself… that keeps the parts of atoms or two bodies touching’ and that ‘the substance of bodies at last becomes nothing but the Deity acting’ (pp. 214–216). Thus the ‘corollaries’ point toward the underlying theocentric agenda of the metaphysical writings.

24 The most extensive study of Edwards' ontology to date is the unpublished thesis by Schafer, Thomas Anton, ‘The Concept of Being in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards’, Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1951.Google Scholar

25 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1.1.7.

26 See Norman Fiering, ‘The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards's Metaphysics’, in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, pp. 73–101, where Edwards is compared to such Continental pundits as Malebranche and Leibniz. More recently it has been suggested by some that the distinction between ‘Continental philosophy’ and ‘British philosophy’ is too facile to be of much interpretive value. Certainly the Cambridge Platonists and Berkeley (in certain respects) are exceptions that challenge the usual generalizations regarding ‘British philosophy’. Yet such a rough distinction still seems to have some usefulness, if only as a rule of thumb.

27 The most important passages identifying God as ‘Being’ or ‘Being in general’ are as follows: Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp. 345, 363; Ethical Writings, pp. 461, 621; and the selections from Edwards' notebooks in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards From His Private Notebooks, edited by Townsend, Harvey (Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon Press), pp. 74Google Scholar, 87. Compare Malebranche's description of God as ‘Being without any limitation, Being infinite, and in general’ (Recherche de la verité, 3.2.8.), and the analysis in Walton, Craig, ‘Malebranche's Ontology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 7 (1969) 143–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bremond, A., ‘Le théocentrisme de Malebranche’, Archives de philosophies 6 (1928) 281–303.Google Scholar

28 The older literature often judged Edwards a ‘pantheist’. Recently this claim has been repeated by Edwards, Rem B., A Return to Moral and Religious Philosophy in Early America (Washington, D.C: University Press of America, 1982), p. 65.Google Scholar

29 Rupp, George, ‘The “Idealism” of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969), 214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Vetoe, Miklos, La pensée de Jonathan Edwards (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1987), p. 49.Google Scholar

31 Edwards, , Ethical Writings, p. 424.Google Scholar

32 The most important passages in Edwards are as follows: Ethical Writings, p. 546; Works (Banner of Truth Edition) 2:125; The Philosophy of Edwards, p. 127.

33 Edwards, , Ethical Writings, p. 546, n. 6.Google Scholar

34 A certain ambiguity arises at this point in Edwards' ontology, inasmuch as the supremacy of God can be served either by placing God at the summit of the ‘chain of being’, or by making God into an ontological ground, not located on the chain but undergirding it at every point. Edwards seems to vacillate on this point, sometimes affirming that God differs from creatures only by virtue of his infinite degree of being (The Philosophy of Edwards, p. 183), and at other times insisting that God differs from creatures because he is an ‘all-comprehending being’ (The Philosophy of Edwards, p. 262). Douglas Elwood entirely denies the existence of any ‘chain of being’ idea in Edwards (Philosophical Theology, p. 28), but this is contradicted by the texts themselves, and Elwood's position seems to reflect his Tillichian notion of ‘Being-itself… as the creative power-to-be that is present in every particular being’.

35 See Ramsey, Bennett, ‘The Ineluctable Impulse: “Consent” in the Thought of Edwards, James, and Royce’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 37 (1983) 302–322.Google Scholar

36 Edwards, , Scientific Writings, p. 336.Google Scholar

37 Edwards, Jonathan, ‘An Essay on the Trinity’, in Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, edited with an introduction by Helm, Paul (Cambridge and London: James Clarke & Co., 1971), pp. 99–131.Google Scholar

38 This crucial assertion of Edwards I designate as ‘the principle of proportionate regard’, which might be stated in Edwards' own words as follows: ‘For 'tis fit that the regard of the Creator should be proportioned to the worthiness of objects, as well as the regard of creatures’ (Ethical Writings, p. 424). The pervasiveness of this principle in his thinking is evidenced by its frequent repetition: Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp. 356, 362, 382; Ethical Writings, pp. 421–424, 426, 460, 548–9, 553, 571; The Philosophy of Edwards, p. 129.

39 Definitions of ‘idealism’ vary, but a couple would equally apply to Edwards: 1) the viewpoint which makes mind or minds the ultimate principle of reality, or 2) the viewpoint that only that which is perceptible to minds has metaphysical status as real.

40 In addition to Wallace E. Anderson, ‘Editor's Introduction’, see his ‘Immaterialism in Jonathan Edwards’ Early Philosophical Notes', Journal ofthe History of Ideas 25 (1964) 181–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other recent studies include: Rupp, George, ‘The “Idealism” of jonthan Edwards', Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969) 209–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCracken, Charles J., Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 329–340Google Scholar; and Smith, Claude A., ‘Jonathan Edwards and “The Way of Ideas”’, Harvard Theological Review 59 (1966) 153–173CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The earlier studies of Edwards’ ‘idealism’, mostly around the turn of the century, were preoccupied with discovering the ‘sources’ of Edwards' idealism. See the following: Gardiner, H. N., ‘The Early Idealism of jonathan Edwards’, Philosophical Review 9 (1900) 573–596CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCracken, J.H., ‘The Sources of jonathan Edwards' Idealism’, Philosophical Review 11 (1902) 537–555Google Scholar; and Gohdes, Clarence, ‘Aspects ofldealism in Early New England’, Philosophical Review 39 (1930) 537–555CrossRefGoogle Scholar. No consensus has ever been reached on the question of Edwards' ‘sources’, except the negative conclusion that Edwards almost certainly did not read George Berkeley before coming to his own distinctive idealist position.

41 Edwards, , The Philosophy of Edwards, p. 193Google Scholar. Berkeley, too, showed a keen sense of the threat posed by materialist philosophy: ‘Particularly, matter, or the absolute existence of corporeal objects, hath been shown to be that wherein the most avowed and pernicious enemies of all knowledge, whether human or divine, have ever placed their chief strength and confidence’ (A Treatise Concerning the First Principles of Human Knowledge, 1.133). Though the old theory of a direct dependence of Edwards on Berkeley is now rejected, there are still remarkable parallels in their independent movements into idealism.

42 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 216.Google Scholar Jenson comments: ‘Edwards’ critique of mechanism is an encompassing piece of demythologizing: there are no little self-sufficient agencies besides God, natural entities are not godlets, and therefore the world harmony is not self-contained’ (America's Theologian, p. 25).

43 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp. 344, 380, 398.Google Scholar

44 Thus Spinoza writes: ‘Besides God no substance can be granted or conceived’ (Ethics, Pt. 1, Prop. 15). Vet note the ensuing comments, which indicate Edwards' marked differences from Spinoza.

45 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 398Google Scholar. Edwards' little phrase, ‘as were’, often occurs in contexts where he draws nearest to some form of monistic teaching. See Suter, Rufus, ‘A Note on Platonism in the Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological Review 52 (1959) 283–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 344.Google Scholar

47 Edwards does not adequately explain how it is that the ideas in God's mind are related to their analogues in human minds, though his language suggests a direct causal relation. One might term his viewpoint an ‘epistemic occasionalism’, in that it attributes to God's agency those acts of human perceiving that might ordinarily be attributed to creaturely causality.

48 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, lae, q.14, a.8.

49 Empiricism is the salient feature of Edwards' well-known intellectual debt to John Locke, as emphasized in Perry Miner's Jonathan Edwards. Edwards enunciates his essential agreement with Lockean empiricism as follows: ‘All acts of the mind are from sensation; all ideas begin from thence, and there can never be any idea, thought or act of the mind unless the mind first received some ideas from sensation’ (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 390). Sense-experience thus has a self-evidential character: ‘Things that we know by immediate sensation, we know intuitively, and they are properly self-evident truths: as, grass is green, the sun shines, honey is sweet’ (p. 346; cf. p. 369).

50 Edwards, , The Philosophy of Edwards, p. 85.Google Scholar

51 Anderson, Wallace, ‘Editor's Introduction’, pp. 78–79Google Scholar.

52 Edwards, , Ethical Writings, p. 432Google Scholar.

53 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 204.Google Scholar

54 The outstanding work on Edwards' aesthetics is Delattre, Roland André, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, a concise summary of which is available as ‘Beauty and Theology: A Reappraisal of Jonathan Edwards’, Soundings 51 (1968) 60–79Google Scholar. Also worthy of note are: Aldrich, A.O., ‘Edwards and Hutcheson’, Harvard Theological Review 44 (1951) 35–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Erdt, Terence, Jonathan Edwards, Art, and the Sense of the Heart (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

55 See Edwards, , Ethical Writings, pp. 561–574.Google Scholar

56 Fiering, , Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought, p. 82.Google Scholar

57 Edwards, Jonathan, Religious Affections, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 2; edited by Smith, John E. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 298Google Scholar. Such comments might create the impression that ‘beauty’ is an even more basic metaphysical category for Edwards than ‘being’. Yet even Delattre admits that ‘Beauty … is ultimately to be resolved into being, rather than the reverse’ (Beauty and Sensibility, p. 25).

58 Edwards, , Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 216.Google Scholar

59 Edwards, Jonathan, Original Sin, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 3; edited by Holbrook, Clyde A. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 402Google Scholar. Edwards expresses a doctrine of continuous creation in his notebooks as well. See The Philosophy of Edwards, pp. 76, 130, and Misc. 18 of the Edwards MSS (in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.)Google Scholar.

60 Thus James Carse speaks of ‘how he so abruptly ceased these avid philosophical inquiries’ (Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility of God [New York: Scribner's, 1967], pp. 34–35)Google Scholar. Yet his concluding works End of Creation and True Virtue (not to mention the later notebook entries), do not bear out the claim that Edwards ever outgrew his philosophizing. He was a born philosopher, if such a thing exists.

61 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics I/I, The Doctrine of the Word of God, translated by Thomson, G.T. (New York: Scribner's, 1936), p. x.Google Scholar

62 See the commentary in von Balthasar, Hans Urs, The Theology of Karl Barth, translated by Dairy, John (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 136–138Google Scholar. There are other common anti-metaphysical arguments, e.g., that metaphysics reduces God to impersonality, that it fails to capture the radical freedom and spontaneity of inter-personal relationships, that it abolishes the concreteness and specificity of essential theological affirmations through illicit generalizing, etc. These are all weighty accusations, which must be taken seriously, and it would require too much space to respond to each of them vis-a-vis Edwards. It is enough here to show that one of the most important objections to theological metaphysics is simply inapplicable to Edwards.