In 1757, the New England theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) sent to the printer a voluminous manuscript entitled The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. Published the next year, shortly after Edwards's death following a smallpox inoculation, the book reflected more than twenty years of disputation among the colonial clergy over fundamental questions about human nature, the divine governance of the world, and the relationship between God's sovereignty and human freedom. In Edwards's view, ‘Arminian’ interpreters of these issues were uprooting sound religion – that is to say, Calvinism – throughout New England. Edwards recognized that the contested theological doctrines carried profound philosophical implications, and he sought to defeat his opponents in debate on both the doctrinal and the metaphysical fronts. Original Sin and The Freedom of the Will (1754) were the principal literary fruits of this long controversy, and, together, they established Edwards's reputation as one of the great philosophical theologians of the Reformed tradition.
In Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin, Oliver D. Crisp, lecturer in theology at the University of Bristol, makes a lucid contribution to the increasing recent interest among analytical philosophers in the analysis of theological doctrines, particularly as these were exposited by classical theologians of the past. In this regard, states Crisp, what Jonathan Edwards had to say about the metaphysics of the Fall, original sin, guilt, and the imputation of sin represented ‘highly original contributions to philosophical theology’ (1) that remain interesting not only as reformulations of the Reformed theological tradition but also as philosophical discussions of great technical rigour. Since ‘there has not been a comprehensive account of the metaphysics that Edwards used to underpin his doctrine of sin’ (2), Crisp's meticulous investigation of this topic has considerable significance for current interest in analytic philosophical theology and the continuously growing body of literature on the theology of Jonathan Edwards.
In his exposition of Edwards, Crisp devotes chapters to the divine decrees, which predestined some humans to redemption and others to reprobation; to the primal sin of Adam's fall and the origin or ‘authorship’ of sin; to the distinction between the secret and the revealed will of God; and to the imputation of original sin to humanity as a whole. Despite his clear admiration for the acuity of Edwards's treatment of these concepts, Crisp finds that, in the final analysis, Edwards failed to synthesize them into a logically coherent whole. In Crisp's estimation, the principal reason for Edwards's failure was his unflinching adherence to occasionalism, ‘the doctrine that God recreates everything that exists out of nothing, at each moment, coupled with a causal thesis, that God alone is the sole causal agent of all things’ (3). Crisp may well be correct in his assessment, but the present review proposes that Crisp's own method of analysis unduly heightens the philosophical difficulties inherent in Edwards's position. In order to elaborate that proposal, the review first illustrates Crisp's analytic method and then poses two general questions about method in analytic philosophical theology.
The doctrine of the Fall is, as Crisp observes, ‘notoriously troublesome’. The nub of these troubles is showing ‘how it is possible that a morally unfallen individual like Adam’ (25) could have chosen evil over good, leading to the consequences of the Fall, not merely for Adam but for humanity as a whole. In other words, this is ‘the problem of the primal sin’ (25), understood as that first sin by which sin entered the world and, to borrow Edwards's phrases, permeated all of ‘Adam's posterity’ with ‘an evil disposition of heart’. In brief, Adam's primal sin occurred when God withheld the support of supernatural principles, and Adam was left to the devices of his natural principles of self-love, the natural appetites, and rational judgment. In this unprotected state, an innocent Adam succumbed because, although God did not strip away the grace of Adam's original righteousness, God did not grant a ‘confirming grace’ that would have carried Adam through temptation. In the classical terminology, Adam passed from a state of being able not to sin to being not able not to sin. Crisp, drawing on Edwards's philosophical notebooks, the Miscellanies, points out that Edwards interpreted this fall from natural innocence into depravity as occurring through self-deception. Adam engaged in rationalization, as it were, in order to convince himself that the immediate preference of his natural appetites was also in his absolute best interest. Sadly, for us all, it was not.
This brief paragraph fails to do justice to Crisp's extraordinarily careful exegesis of Edwards's arguments. Crisp's core audience consists of philosophical theologians of an analytic bent, and historians, such as the present reviewer, may lament the inattention to Edwards's historical context and the rhetorical and polemical assumptions embedded in his texts. However, Crisp's short book will challenge readers from virtually any disciplinary perspective to look far more carefully at what Edwards actually said than they are likely to have done. This is a worthy achievement in 146 pages.
Throughout the book, Crisp employs sequences of formal propositions to analyse the logical options in the progression of Edwards's arguments. In the following example (37), A and B are moral agents, T is a proposition about a moral truth, and D expresses that truth ambiguously.
(1) A comprehends T.
(2) A comprehends D.
(3) A withholds T and explains D to B.
(4) B comprehends the truth of T, but
(5) B prefers (that which is expressed in) D to (that which is expressed in) T.
(6) B desires (that which is expressed in) D over (that which is expressed in) T.
(7) B acts on the basis of his preference and desire in accordance with D, not T.
(8) B thereby sins.
In this scenario, moral agent B is culpable because B has permitted an ambiguously stated version of the truth to appeal to the preferences of, let us say, vanity, overriding the rational judgment that T presents the truth in an unvarnished, albeit less flattering form (cf. 52, n. 41). Crisp illustrates such propositional analyses through the hypothetical antics of ‘Gary’, ‘Trevor’, and ‘Wayne’. Since this is, after all, a book about sin, Gary, Trevor, and Wayne display regrettable propensities toward lust, adultery, and incitement to fisticuffs.
The purpose of this analytic procedure is to reduce each step in a given argument by Edwards to a generalized set of logical options for personal moral conduct. This analytic procedure raises two broad questions about method in the analysis of classical texts in philosophical theology. First, to what extent must the analyst take account of the literary genre and rhetoric of the text in question when devising his or her own argumentative strategy? In the case at hand, the underlying text is a mythic, history-like narrative (the Genesis account of Adam and Eve). For the Genesis narrative, temporal sequence would seem to be essential to the nature of the text. In transposing narrative time into logical sequences, is it incumbent on the analyst to mount a philosophical demonstration that this does no violence to what one might call the logic of temporality? Similarly, Edwards in Original Sin drew considerable rhetorical attention to a recurring set of organic metaphors. How, if at all, should the philosophical theologian adjust the strategies of analytic philosophy to account for the argumentative weight that a given author places on metaphor or other tropes?
The second question about analytic procedure in philosophical theology has to do with tacit assumptions embedded in the procedure that may bias its argumentative outcome. All of Crisp's hypothetical constructions assume that sin may be appraised as a matter of personal or individual conduct, the moral judgments and actions of a ‘Trevor’. Sin, in the Reformed tradition and at many other points in the history of Christian theology, has also been understood as a propensity tightly woven into the structure of social institutions, hierarchies of status and economy, relations of gender and kinship. Sin, in a word, is corporate. Is it not incumbent on the analyst to mount a philosophical demonstration that his or her mode of analysis does not tacitly privilege one definition of a concept over another, one dimension of a philosophical problem over another?
With these questions in mind, the issue of Edwards's occasionalism takes on a different aspect. As Crisp emphasizes, Edwards argued for God's continuous creation of the world and for God's ultimate causal agency throughout creation, in order to drive home the doctrinal point that the existence of all creation utterly depended on an absolutely sovereign God. But Crisp concludes his book by arguing that, although Edwards employed occasionalism to defend the doctrines of original sin and divine sovereignty, it is precisely Edwards's occasionalism that ‘undermines’ and ‘destroys’ his philosophical work (130). In the cosmos of occasionalism, according to Crisp, the passage of time consists of discrete, contiguous moments, each with no causal bearing on what follows or precedes it. This certainly calls attention to one aspect of Edwards's position, which he illustrated in Original Sin through the brightness of the moon, which appeared to be a permanent effect but actually was a sequence of light waves, ceasing and being renewed at each successive point of time. Thus, none of these rays was the same, and the sensation of permanence was the effect of a succession of new impulses.
As part of the same argument, however, Edwards employed a cluster of organic metaphors that seem equally important to his overall purpose of underscoring the nature of humanity as a corporate whole and God as the sustaining source of all creation. In these tropes, Adam was presented as the head of the whole body of humanity or the root of the whole tree, and God was identified as the fountain of all being. These tropes strongly connect Original Sin to two other posthumously published treatises by Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue and Concerning the End for Which God Created the World. Those works proposed that the nature of God's glory was in the communication of God's own self to the universal system of existence, overflowing in an emanation of communicated holiness, moral excellence, and beauty. By virtue of this divine communication to the created order, human societies displayed a ‘secondary beauty’ in such collective traits as order and justice.
Crisp's analysis of the metaphysics of sin has provided an extraordinarily lucid reading of one side of Edwards's argument: the monad-like succession of single entities in time and the personalistic interpretation of sin. But on another side Edwards argued for a universal system of being that cohered through harmony and reciprocity among all its parts, and it was against this divinely sustained concurrence, Edwards believed, that the corporate flaw of original sin had mounted a furious, but ultimately futile, rebellion. Can these two sides of Edwards's doctrine of sin be reconciled? Whatever the answer, scholars, and certainly this reviewer, are in Crisp's debt for his challenging investigation of the issues at stake.
