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Self-Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards's “Treatise Concerning Religious Affections”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Ava Chamberlain
Ava Chamberlain
Affiliation:
Ms. Chamberlain is the assistant editor for The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
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Extract

Like many great theologians, Jonathan Edwards was a polemicist. Although he kept extensive personal notebooks in which he developed his views concerning scripture interpretation and doctrinal theology, in most instances he did not publish these views without the catalyst afforded by theological controversy. Throughout the course of Edwards's ministry Arminianism was his constant foe. In the 1730s he published a number of anti-Arminian sermons and actively opposed the ordination of Robert Breck, an Arminian sympathizer. He also viewed the revivals as falling within the scope of this anti-Arminian polemic. In Faithful Narrative (1737) he expressed concern over the spread of Arminianism in the Connecticut Valley and portrayed the revival as working directly against this tendency. Likewise in Some Thoughts (1743) he predicted that the activity of the Holy Spirit in the revivals would “entirely overthrow their scheme of religion” and suggested, “Now is a good time for Arminians to change their principles.” In the late 1740s on several occasions he recorded his intention to write “something particularly and largely on the Arminian controversy, in distinct discourses on the various points in dispute.” Although he was temporarily distracted from this proposed project by the communion controversy in Northampton, he began to carry it out soon after the move to Stockbridge, publishing Freedom of the Will in 1754.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 541 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1994

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References

1. Edwards, Jonathan, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1972), vol. 4, The Great Awakening, ed. Goen, C. C., p. 148.Google Scholar

2. Edwards, , The Great Awakening, p. 503.Google Scholar

3. Edwards to the Rev. John Erskine (1747), in Dwight, Sereno, The Life of President Edwards (New York, 1830), p. 250;Google Scholarsee also pp. 251, 270.Google Scholar

4. As William Breitenbach argues in a recent article, “From the early 1740s, when he began to recognize that enthusiastic Antinomianism was as great a menace to true religion as moralistic Arminianism, Edwards dedicated himself to a single, sustained purpose—the defense of Calvinism against extremists of both sides”: “Piety and Moralism: Edwards and the New Divinity,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, eds. Hatch, Nathan O. and Stout, Harry S. (New York, 1988), p. 190.Google Scholar

5. Edwards, , The Great Awakening, p. 285.Google Scholar

6. Edwards, , The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1959), Vol. 2, Religious Affections, ed. Smith, John E., p. 183.Google Scholar

7. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 173; emphasis added.Google Scholar

8. See Fiering, Norman, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, 1981), p. 172.Google Scholar

9. Edwards, , The Great Awakening, pp. 157–159.Google Scholar

10. Edwards to the Rev. Gillespie, Thomas (1 07 1751), in Dwight, Life, p. 466.Google Scholar

11. Dwight, Life, p. 464. Edwards did accept some of the blame, stating that because of his “youth, and want of more judgment and experience” he “had no strength to oppose received notions, and established customs, and to testify boldly against some glaring false appearances, and counterfeits of religion, till it was too late” (p. 465).Google Scholar

12. Croswell, Andrew, What is Christ to me, if he is not mine? Or, a Seasonable Defence of the Old Protestant Doctrine of Justifying Faith (Boston, 1745), p. 10.Google ScholarOn Croswell, see Schmidt, Leigh Eric, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (04 1986): 214–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 95.Google Scholar

17. Proudfoot, Wayne uses this distinction in his article “From Theology to a Science of Religions: Jonathan Edwards and William James on Religious Affections,” Harvard Theological Review 82 (04 1989): 149–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Frothingham, Ebenezer defended this practice: “A Saint of God having Divine Light shining into the Understanding, and the Love of God (or pure Charity, which is the same), ruling in the soul, is…to know certainly that such and such Persons are true Converts, or the Saints of God.” See Articles of Faith and Practice, p. 47.Google Scholar

19. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 181.Google Scholar

20. “Conversion,” states Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, “was but the point of departure for a life of devotional practice and spiritual progress” that had as its goal assurance of salvation. See The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Practices in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, 1982), p. 199.Google Scholar

21. Morgan, E. S., Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithica, 1965), p. 91.Google Scholar

22. For example, Croswell stated that “true Faith is of a particular Nature, whereby every one believes Christ to be his Saviour, and hath just so much Assurance as he hath Faith,” and asserted that true Christians received “Knowledge of [their] good Estate, partly, and principally by the Spirit of Adoption shining immediately into [their] Hearts”: What is Christ to me, pp. 31, 32.Google Scholar

23. See Breitenbach, , “Piety and Moralism,” p. 183.Google Scholar

24. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 171.Google Scholar

25. In the eleventh uncertain sign Edwards argued that assurance itself was an uncertain sign of grace. He also insisted that faith should not be equated with assurance: “The Scripture represents faith, as that by which men are brought into a good estate; and therefore it can't be the same thing, as believing that they are already in a good estate.” See Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 178.Google Scholar

26. Edwards, , Religious Affections, pp. 171–172.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 380.

28. Ibid., p. 195. In this passage, Edwards is paraphrasing Philippians 3:13–14.

29. Ibid., p. 127.

30. Ibid., pp. 182–183.

31. See Proudfoot's discussion of the uncertain signs in “From Theology to a Science of Religions,” pp. 156–157.Google Scholar

32. Stoever, William states that Edwards's “notion of the ‘new spiritual sense’…was a restatement, in terms of Lockeian empiricism rather than scholastic metaphysics, of Reformed orthodoxy's insistence that grace qualitatively enhances the power of the human faculties, without destroying their nature.”Google ScholarSee “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn., 1978), p. 190.Google Scholar

33. This extreme form of antinomianism was rarely advocated in New England. By denouncing it, Croswell defended himself against charges of antinomianism.Google ScholarSee Croswell, Andrew, Heaven Shut Against All Arminians and Antinomians. Shewed in a Sermon from Revelation XlV.xii (Boston, 1747), p. 11.Google ScholarGoen, C. C. records some instances of perfectionism and libertinism among the separatists in Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (rep. Middletown, Conn., 1987; New Haven, 1962), pp. 200–202.Google Scholar

34. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 206.Google Scholar

35. Edwards defined truly gracious affections as those produced by a perception of moral excellency: “Those affections that are truly holy, are primarily founded on the loveliness of the moral excellency of divine things. Or…a love to divine things for the beauty and sweetness of their moral excellency, is the first beginning and spring of all holy affections.”Google ScholarSee Edwards, , Religious Affections, pp. 253–254.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p. 205.

37. This is a common modern interpretation of Edwards. For example, Erdt, Terrence states that the sense of the heart “constitutes unique knowledge of God's mercy and of one's own election. But because of its basis in inward feeling, it is knowledge known experimentally, through individual experience.” See Jonathan Edwards: Art and the Sense of the Heart (Amherst, Mass., 1980), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

38. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 194.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 195.

40. Ibid., p. 273.

41. In comparing Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, William Breitenbach states, “These twice-born men were both once-burned.… [B]oth men realized that they had been duped because they themselves had succumbed to the temptations of antinomianism. Both had eagerly seized on the bright promises of an easy and effortless redemption.”Google ScholarSee “Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Franklin and Edwards,” Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture, eds. Oberg, Barbara B. and Stout, Harry S. (New York, 1993), p. 20.Google Scholar

42. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 432; emphasis added.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., p. 431.

44. Ibid., p. 389.

45. Ibid., p. 452.

46. Ibid., p. 452.

47. Ibid., p. 423.

48. Ibid., p. 398.

49. “When a natural man denies his lust, and lives a strict, religious life, and seems humble, painful and earnest in religion, ‘tis not natural,’ tis all force against nature; as when a stone is violently thrown upwards; but that force will be gradually spent; yet nature will remain in its full strength, and so prevails again, and the stone returns downwards.… But if the old nature be indeed mortified, and a new and heavenly nature infused; then may it well be expected, that men will walk in newness of life, and continue to do so to the end of their days.” Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 396.Google Scholar

50. Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 84.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., pp. 120, 452.