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Jonathan Edwards and the lapsarian debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2009

Michael Allen
Michael Allen*
Affiliation:
Knox Theological Seminary, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33308mallen@knoxseminary.edu
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Abstract

Contrary to what might be expected from such a thinker, Jonathan Edwards was restrained in conversation with the Reformed debate about the order of the divine decrees, known as the infralapsarian/supralapsarian debate. I will address Edwards's caution regarding this particular debate: first, by tracing the contours of the broader Reformed debate on the divine decrees and its evolution from engagement of Arminian theology to that of theodicy; second, by noting where Edwards does not speak to this debate and exegeting the few passages where he does take it up; third, by analysing the particular questions that Edwards addresses when he does engage the debate; fourth, by pointing to constructive lessons gained by understanding why a careful thinker might be atypically silent. I will demonstrate that Edwards engaged the lapsarian debate insofar as was necessary to rebuke the Arminian denial of unconditional election, yet he refused to engage the debate as a means of articulating a theodicy. In both his engagement and disengagement, Edwards refused to answer the debate on its standard terms and offers an example of carefully crafting doctrine according to theological and contextual concerns.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , August 2009 , pp. 299 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2009

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References

1 My thanks to Dr Mark Noll for his extensive comments on this article.

2 See Mouw, Richard, ‘Another Look at the Infra/Supralapsarian Debate’, Calvin Theological Journal 35 (2000), pp. 136–51Google Scholar. Mouw argues here and elsewhere for the importance of the infralapsarian position to Reformed efforts at cultural engagement. This concern will be engaged historically and constructively below. Robert L. Reymond has also discussed the lapsarian debates in his A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (2nd edn; Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1998), pp. 479–502. Reymond has classical concerns as opposed to the issues of christology and culture that Mouw considers.

3 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, II/2, The Doctrine of God, trans. Bromiley, G. W. et al. , ed. Bromiley, G. W. et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), p. 127Google Scholar.

4 Barth provides a masterful summary of the debate (ibid., pp. 127–39) and notes the correctives which place him in a heavily modified supralapsarian position (ibid., pp. 139–45).

5 Turretin, Francis, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, trans. Giger, George M., ed. Dennison, James T. Jr, (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992), p. 341Google Scholar.

6 Heppe, Heinrich, Reformed Dogmatics as Set out and Illustrated from the Sources, trans. Thomson, G. T., ed. Bizer, Ernst (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1978), p. 135Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 146.

8 Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, p. 417.

9 Ibid., p. 419.

10 Ibid.

11 This is a modified form of the most helpful chart in Reymond, New Systematic Theology, p. 488.

12 Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, p. 343.

13 Ibid., p. 346.

14 This is a modified form of the most helpful chart in Reymond, New Systematic Theology, p. 480.

15 Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 157.

16 Ibid., p. 159.

17 Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, p. 342.

18 Ibid., p. 344.

19 While Dordt endorsed an infralapsarian schema, there was no condemnation of supralapsarians. For the diversity of orderings among the Reformed, see Muller, Richard A., Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), pp. 4–12Google Scholar.

20 See esp. Trueman, Carl, ‘Calvin and Calvinism’, in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 225–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fesko, J. V., Diversity within the Reformed Tradition: Calvin, Dort, and Westminster (Greenville, SC: Reformed Academic Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

21 Holmes, Stephen R., God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), p. 128Google Scholar.

22 See ‘Miscellany 700’ and ‘Miscellany 704’, both in The ‘Miscellanies’ 501–832, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18; ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 282–3 and 314–21.

23 Jonathan Edwards, ‘Miscellany 700’, p. 283.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 For helpful discussion of the rhetorical use of doctrine (especially for the Reformed tradition), see Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (Columbia Series in Reformed Theology; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995); and Ellen Charry, By the Renewing of your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

27 Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984)Google Scholar. For recent analysis of the so-called ‘Yale school’ and ‘postliberal theology’, see Hunsinger, George, ‘Postliberal theology’, in Vanhoozer, Kevin J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 42–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Regarding the relationship between the function of doctrine and Lindbeck's grammatical depiction of doctrine, see Marshall, Bruce, ‘Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian’, The Thomist 53 (1989), pp. 353–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Dennis Ockholm and Timothy Phillips (eds), The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), esp. part III.

29 Jonathan Edwards, ‘Miscellany 700’, p. 283 (emphasis mine).

30 Jonathan Edwards, ‘Miscellany 704’, p. 314.

31 Ibid., p. 315.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., p. 315.

34 Ibid., pp. 316–20.

35 Ibid., p. 317.

36 Ibid., pp. 316–17.

37 Ibid., p. 316.

38 Ibid., p. 317.

39 Ibid., p. 321.

40 Stephen Holmes rightly notes the tie between Edwards's doctrine of hell and his response to Locke's Enlightenment project (see his God of Grace and God of Glory, pp. 200–11).

41 Norman Fiering notes that ‘Edwards was the most famous fire and brimstone preacher in the eighteenth century, and possibly the most famous in the entire history of Western civilization’: Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 203.

42 Jonathan Edwards, ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, in Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 22; ed. Stout et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 414.

43 The two choices are portrayed, respectively, in Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter and Hollingdale, R. J. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Hart, David Bentley, The Beauty of the Infinite: the Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003)Google Scholar. The bifurcation of ‘ontological peace’ and ‘ontological violence’ finds fruitful exposition in Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar, part IV. Milbank also utilises the terminology of ‘neo-Nietzschean’ to depict those who follow Nietzsche in positing ‘original violence’ (ibid., pp. 278–9).

44 See esp. Delattre, Roland A., Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Jenson, Robert W., America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 2.Google Scholar; Louis J. Mitchell, Jonathan Edwards and the Experience of Beauty, Studies in Reformed Theology and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2003), pp. 46–8.

45 Edwards, ‘Sinners’, p. 414.

46 Fiering notes that ‘the justification for the very existence of a hell provides the essential framework for any discussion of its specific nature’: Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Theology, p. 212. Edwards's theological move simply inverts this relationship – demonstrating the justification of hell in its intention.

47 Edwards, ‘Sinners’, p. 414.

48 Ibid., p. 415.

49 Jenson, America's Theologian, pp. 107–10.

50 It is precisely this point which Stephen Holmes fails to acknowledge, namely, that God can will damnation as a good. Holmes takes Edwards's Lockean idealism to require the notion that all intelligent Christians will now understand good and evil; most intelligent Christians now do not see hell as a good; therefore, hell is not a good. Holmes has overstated the first two statements: (1) Edwards's idealism is quite a bit more chastened than that of Locke; and (2) some intelligent Christians do see hell as good. Holmes's critique also suffers from its conflation of trinitarianism with a certain interpretation of christocentricism, such that Holmes posits that only Christ suffers the pangs of hell for God's glory and the onlooking of the righteous. That such an image – the Son of God suffering hell – is any less horrible than Edwards's view of hell is questionable. That such a concept is the only way to be trinitarian (Holmes's contention) is thoroughly questionable. Cf. Holmes, God of Grace and God of Glory, pp. 215–40.

51 The identification of what God wills qua good with what humans will qua evil in Edwards has led many scholars to posit that he does not refer to the same thing (and, therefore, that he does not account for the occurrence of the first sin). See Sam Storms, Tragedy in Eden: Original Sin in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), p. 224; Clyde Holbrook, ‘Jonathan Edwards Addresses Some “Modern Critics” of Original Sin’, Journal of Religion 63 (1983), pp. 211–30. Pace John Kearney, ‘Jonathan Edwards’ Account of Adam's First Sin’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 15 (1997), p. 128. The failing of these accounts lies in their inattention to Edwards's broader metaphysical wedding of Neoplatonic tendencies with Reformed theology. Jenson's acumen in joining metaphysical and narratival concerns is more profitable (see America's Theologian, esp. p. 110).

52 In this respect Edwards has offered a positive construal of hell quite similar to that of Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa.IIae.19.1: ‘Punishment is indeed a genuine sort of evil, since it does in fact result in the loss of some particular good; nevertheless in the last analysis it is good, namely in regard to its bearing upon the ultimate end.’

53 ‘From the time of his conversion, Edwards considered it a symptom of faithlessness to be asking too many questions about God's eternal judgments’ (Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 213).

54 Barth, Karl, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, trans. Guder, Darrell L. and Guder, Judith J., Columbia Series in Reformed Theology and History (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), p. 12Google Scholar.

55 Mouw, ‘Another Look at the Infra/Supralapsarian Debate’.

56 Ibid., p. 146.