Prolific Edwards scholars Oliver Crisp and Kyle Strobel have teamed up to provide a ‘manageable overview’ for those coming to Jonathan Edwards’ thought for the first time (p. 2). After chapters on intellectual context, beauty and glory, idealism, creation, atonement and salvation as participation, they turn to the beauty of the ethical life before a final chapter of critical assessment.
Crisp and Strobel offer some helpful and striking observations. They argue that for Edwards the atonement was driven primarily for God's honour, but was designed to answer Christ's infinite love for his people and the fittingness of wisdom and beauty (pp. 121–45). Salvation for America's theologian comes because God seeks to call creatures into his life, so the Father sends his Son to find a bride to join his family (p. 168). Much has been said about Edwards’ obsession with beauty and rightly so, but the authors insist that love too is ‘absolutely foundational’ to his theological vision (p. 194).
The authors are particularly interested in Edwards’ philosophical theology, principally his idealism and occasionalism. There is little discussion of other theological interests of Edwards such as church, mission, providence, revival, history, scripture, eschatology or typology.
Crisp and Strobel argue that Edwards’ theological compatibilism in which humans act by moral necessity but with natural freedom ‘denies real causal agency to creatures’ (p. 113). Edwards’ assertion that in human choosing ‘God does all’ and ‘is the only proper author’ (p. 211) means that ‘creatures are merely the occasions of God's action’ (p. 111). This implies that God causes evil, or at least is morally responsible for sin (pp. 119–20). It appears that God needs evil for his glory (p. 214). The authors agree with Richard Mueller that in this occasionalism Edwards departed from the Reformed tradition. According to Mueller and the authors, none of the Reformed Orthodox shared these ideas of moral necessity or divine determinism (pp. 209–10).
Another problem for the authors is that Edwards's account of creation makes it necessary because in his End of Creation Edwards says that it was God's disposition ‘to an emanation of his own infinite fullness’ that ‘excited him to create the world’. According to Crisp and Strobel, this means that God is ‘so constituted that he must create a world’ (p. 119, my emphasis). He is ‘constrained to act as he does by his perfect nature’ (p. 120, my emphasis).
A third objection is to Edwards’ supposed immaterialism. He is said to have denied the existence of material objects (p. 8). Things that appear to be material are in fact immaterial (p. 70). There is really nothing material at all, only minds and their ideas (p. 73).
It does not seem to this reviewer that any of these objections can be sustained. As if to respond to the first charge of a denial of creaturely agency, the American thinker famously wrote that while God does all, so do we: ‘We are not merely passive in [efficacious grace], nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all and we do all. God produces all and we act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active’ (quoted on p. 211). In other words, human action is not zero-sum. Divine efficiency does not negate human agency.
This coinherence of human and divine willing is little different from what Voetius, Turretin and Mastricht asserted, as Paul Helm has recently shown (‘Jonathan Edwards and the Parting of the Ways?’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 4/1, 2014). Turretin, for example, wrote that ‘the determination of the [human] will does not exclude but supposes the determination of God’ (p. 46 in Helm). Like Edwards he spoke of ‘moral necessity’ in which ‘there is slavery arising from good or bad habits’ (p. 53). Mastricht (Edwards’ favourite theologian) taught that God determines the will and so produces a volition, but ‘by such determination God's providence neither abolishes nor harms the freedom of our arbitrium in any way by determining it’ (Theoretico-practica Theologia 3.10.17). Mueller has written elsewhere that the Reformed Orthodox believed in this human–divine concursus even in evil human acts, where God produces his ends ‘in and through the evil of creatures’ (Dictionary of Latin-Greek Theological Terms, 76). Edwards actually agreed with the Reformed consensus that God is not the author of sin by producing it as efficient author but instead regulates it by his wisdom (Freedom of the Will, Yale edn, pp. 403–5).
Did Edwards consider the creation necessary? The authors concede that Edwards explicitly denied ‘any dependence of the Creator on the creature, for any part of his perfection’ (p. 97n). Hence for Edwards the creation was not necessary to complete the divine perfections. Nor, according to Edwards, did God's disposition to emanate ‘good … at all diminish the freeness of his beneficence in this communication’ (End of Creation, Yale edn, p. 460). God has a disposition to love so that he loves by moral necessity. But each act of love is nevertheless free: ‘[God's being] happy in [human] happiness … is so far from being inconsistent with the freeness of beneficence that, on the contrary, free benevolence and kindness consist in it’ (p. 461). The authors insist that the concept of emanation suggests unwilled necessity, but Edwards had a different kind of emanation in mind.
Was Edwards an immaterialist? If so, he contradicted his empiricist epistemology in which we depend on sense experience for our knowledge of the everyday world. How can we do so if there is no world around us? He also contradicted the presumptions of his metaphysical writings. His Of Atoms, for example, is an extensive examination of ‘bodies’ and ‘atoms’. All bodies are composed of atoms (Of Atoms, Yale edn, pp. 208–14); ‘the infinite power of God’ preserves bodies in being (p. 214); all body is from the immediate exercise of divine power (pp. 214–16); there is no metaphysically independent ‘substance’ which sustains bodies (pp. 215–16) – only divine power. Therefore there ‘is no such thing as mechanism, if that word is taken to be that whereby bodies act each upon other, purely and properly by themselves’ (p. 216, my emphasis).
After stating in Of Being that ‘the being [of material things] is only by [the knowledge and consciousness of other beings]’, Edwards wrote about ‘the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substance’. The authors use this quote to support immaterialism, but miss the force of Edwards’ comparison: ‘the most substantial’ (Of Being, Yale edn, p. 206). Substantiality is not all or nothing but a matter of degree. Spirits are more substantial than material things, and are responsible for the existence of material things. The comparison works only because both spirits and material things exist.
In sum, this book provides insightful overviews of Edwards’ thinking on beauty, theosis and atonement. But its coverage of Edwards’ moral ontology and metaphysics raises as many questions as it answers.
