The GOSPEL TRUTH

A GENETIC HISTORY OF THE

NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY

By

FRANK HUGH FOSTER

1907

 JONATHAN EDWARDS

CHAPTER II:

Edwards' Earlier Labors

The New England churches have now evidently come to a crisis. They have been established in America for a full century. The forces embraced in the perfected system of Calvinism, both good and evil, have been at work a hundred years upon a field singularly favorable to their normal development, protected by its isolation from the most demoralizing tendencies, but not wholly excluded from the general influences, of the age. The course of events has been against the better of them and has tended to emphasize the worse. Political and social degeneration resulting from the trials of the frontier has operated to assist. And, at the end, it seems that the whole theological system, is about to give way to another, and with this change the great principles of the Protestant Reformation seem about to fall. But much of the old was evidently good, and cannot be surrendered, and much of the new is bad, and must be resisted. Evidently a great work is waiting to be done, and one demanding a man. What man is there who can do it?

The answer was providentially given in the birth and career of Jonathan Edwards. Born and trained in a parsonage, it was but natural that his early religious experiences should be marked. For a time they were overshadowed by the intellectual interests which engaged his opening mind. At ten years of age he was able to refute with cogency and wit the doctrine that the soul is material and sleeps with the body till the resurrection. At thirteen he was ready for college, and at fourteen he was reading Locke's Essay upon Human Understanding and enjoying a far higher pleasure in the perusal of its pages "than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly discovered treasure." With the sensational philosophy of this great thinker he became entirely familiar, but the spiritual and mystical tendencies of his own mind, combined no doubt with the influence of that strain of thought which, first put by Augustine into the words, Omne bonum aut Deus aut ex Deo, had become the determining element in Calvinism, led him to conclusions substantially identical with those of Bishop Berkeley, with whose writings he may have been familiar. The great thoughts of Leibnitz and of Malebranche, of Cumberland and of Hutcheson, became familiar to him, probably through the personal reading of their works. And by his own independent study he had already arrived, while a mere boy, at those great leading principles which formed the staple of his later thinking and constitute his chief contribution to the thought of his age.

Thus Edwards became intellectually equipped for the task of a theologian above any of his contemporaries. He brought from his studies competent learning, the matured fruits of original thinking, marked independence and entire candor of mind, exceptional acuteness and thoroughness, and chief of all the unquenched fire of native genius of a high order. But he possessed higher qualifications for the work that was to fall to him than even these. That early spiritual experience of divine truth, which had suffered a partial eclipse in later childhood, had been renewed and deepened with his increasing maturity of mind. It is significant, and to a large degree determinative of the whole development of New England theology, that it was about the doctrine of the divine sovereignty that his thoughts principally centered, and that this doctrine, the central idea of Calvinism as distinguished from the Arminianism which was just then entering New England and creating the problem which Edwards was providentially set to solve, though it once "used to appear like a horrible doctrine" to him, became "not only a conviction, but a delightful conviction." His mind possessed the power of spiritual intuition, characteristic of his Welsh ancestry, in a large degree. He seemed to behold spiritual truths by direct vision. And he was eminently a man of prayer, of intimate communion with God as his Father and Friend.

It is comparatively easy for us who live at this later day to formulate the problem which lay before Edwards. It was not to make all things new. The fruits of a historical development were not to be rashly or carelessly relinquished. What was good in the old formulations of doctrine was to be preserved. But at the same time the old could not be reintroduced without modification. Theological opposition and innovation is never properly met by simple reaffirmation of old positions in the old language. The reason for the objection must be perceived and appreciated by him who would give it a due and conclusive answer. What is true in it must be acknowledged and given proper weight. He who will teach must himself learn. Hence what has justly offended the newly awakened mind of an inquiring age must be set aside, and out of all the materials afforded by the times, new and old, the theologian must go on to introduce, with his better formulations of the old principles, other principles which may be absolutely new.

It cannot be said that Edwards placed the problem before himself in any such form. He was profoundly attached to the Calvinistic system, and his first instinct was to restore it to its high place of influence. This was so far well, and he was hereby preserved from the first great danger of a leader at such a time, that of disloyalty to the past. But, though he may have had no thought of doctrinal change, his mind was too original and his studies too exact to permit him to remain where his fathers had been. He was, possibly, somewhat deficient at first in respect for the positions of his adversaries, though not for the influence which they were exerting. But his perfect candor, his clear perception of truth, and his personal humility combined to open to him many new vistas as he studied, and what truth he saw he acknowledged and made his own. Thus he made a reply to the departures of the day which was capable of meeting the situation and of advancing the interests of theology. If his natural intensity of conviction and expression as to what he was led to adopt, which seems to make all his writings pulsate with life, be added, the fitness of Edwards to solve the theological problem of his day, largely unconscious as it was, will have been made clear.

Edwards' ministry began in a place where the full force of the theological situation could be felt, in Northampton, as the colleague of Solomon Stoddard, to whom he sustained the relation of grandson. In that parish, where the most extreme application of the Half-Way Covenant had been made, the subtle influences of Arminianism were most likely to attract the attention and excite the opposition of such a man as Edwards. For a time no sign of this appears. His grandfather survived his ordination two years, and for two more nothing occurs to mark his work as in any sense peculiar. But in the year 1731 he was invited to preach the "public lecture" in Boston, and selected as his theme "God Glorified in Man's Dependence." He set forth the absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed upon God as the cause, and only proper cause, of all their good. The grace, the power, the direct agency of God are emphasized, and he is presented as the "objective" and "inherent" good of his saints. The doctrine of the sermon was in no respect remarkable, but something in its tone attracted great attention. Its secret is revealed in the following passage from the "use." Says Edwards:

Hence those doctrines and schemes of divinity that are in any respect opposite to such an absolute and universal dependence on God, derogate from his glory and thwart the design of our redemption. And such are those schemes that . . . own an entire dependence upon God for some things, but not for others; they own that we depend on God for the gift and acceptance of a Redeemer, but deny so absolute a dependence on him for the obtaining of an interest in the Redeemer. They own an absolute dependence on the Father for giving his Son, and on the Son for working out redemption, but not so entire a dependence upon the Holy Ghost for conversion, and a being in Christ, and so coming to a title to his benefits. They own a dependence on God for means of grace, but not absolutely for the benefit and success of those means, etc.

It is unquestionable that the preacher, in this reference to undue emphasis upon human independence and initiative, had in mind that "prevailing" Arminianism against which the principal contests of his life were to be waged.

Three years later the silence was again broken by a sermon, preached in his own church, upon the doctrine of a "Divine and Supernatural Light Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God," which was defined as consisting not in our natural convictions of sin and misery, nor in any impression made upon the imagination, nor in any new truths not contained in the word of God, but in a "sense of the divine and superlative excellency of the things of religion," and "a conviction of the truth and reality of them," If in the former sermon the logical and doctrinal theologian was foreshadowed, here we find the spiritual seer.

These sermons were like the first booming of a solitary gun upon the opening of a great battle. The more special work of Edwards began when in 1734 he preached a sermon, afterwards expanded into a treatise and published, which initiated his first revival, and began a new epoch in American religious life. It was entitled Justification by Faith, and was a direct attack upon Arminianism. It is a strong and original presentation of the common doctrine of the Reformed churches upon this subject. Positions are maintained which Edwards' successors, following out principles which he had given them, were led to reject, although we easily trace at such points a certain conventionality of treatment, which indicates the controlling influence of theological tradition. But at other points the investigating mind which was always asking the reason for every accepted doctrine, and the spiritual trend of the writer's thought, come prominently to view. justification is defined as consisting, not merely in the forgiveness of our sins, but in the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us whereby we have that which is the ground of our being rewarded with eternal life. The defense of imputation is conventional. But the definition of faith and of repentance marks a distinct advance upon the tone of the previous century, and the explanation of the reason why faith should be made the condition of justification departs widely from the mechanical methods of Calvinistic scholasticism and reproduces the true spiritual atmosphere of the better days. Every idea of merit in faith is excluded--here is the evangelical element; but faith is said to be the condition of forgiveness, because it unites the soul to Christ so that there is a fitness in bestowing such a favor in consequence of it. justification is thus a "manifestation of God's regard to the beauty of that order that there is in uniting those things that have a natural agreement and congruity and unition of the one with the other."

One can scarcely refrain, as he thus passes over the first great influential work of the originator of a new school in theology, from asking how far the future master was seen in his first attempt; nor from considering more seriously whether Edwards really showed himself the man fully to cope with the New England situation. We have already traced the condition of the churches at this time to the lack of conversions, and this lack to the constant preaching of the divine sovereignty in the form of the inability of man. The mind of the age, as well as the experience of the churches, had come to the point where the old doctrine of sovereignty needed modification. More room was demanded for the activity of man. It was at this point that the new leader was to be tested. Could he perceive the real difficulty? Had he any sufficient remedy to offer?

In reply to these questions, a somewhat ambiguous answer must be made. Edwards saw what all saw--Arminians, Half-Way men like Stoddard, and Calvinists alike--that the great necessity of the times was conversions. He saw, what many did not see, that the conversion required was a deep and pervading, a divinely. wrought work in the soul. He saw also that the tendency among the Arminians to confuse a "good, moral life" with the Christian life, and to depend for salvation upon the striking at the day of judgment of a kind of moral balance-sheet between good and bad deeds, was a fundamental abandonment of the gospel. The new emphasis upon the worth and place of man in the scheme of things had forgotten for the time that he had misused his freedom radically, and was guilty and ruined. What was wanted, therefore, was just the old doctrine of salvation by faith, by spiritual union with God, and by justification, by the free forgiveness of the sinner in the infinite grace of God in Jesus Christ; and this Edwards enforced with great power. The result was the renewal of what had almost ceased, of conversions, and the revival by the logic of facts in the thinking of the churches of the doctrine of the new birth. There was no new truth brought forward at this point, but a new impression of the truth was made which was almost equivalent to the impression which a new truth is adapted to make. The doctrine of regeneration acquired practical effectiveness, for men were actually born again in great numbers in the revivals of the years 1735 and 1740, and thus the old paralysis of New England was broken up.

But Edwards did not at this time see the source of that old paralysis in the doctrine of inability. His influence was that of a great preacher, not yet that of a great thinker. He was not yet at the point where the arguments of his opponents could begin to have a large effect upon his own convictions. He held too strong views as to the divine sovereignty, and had found the doctrine too "delightful" to be much inclined to learn where it had gradually obscured other truths by its too rank development. Hence the doctrine of inability, the source of the whole difficulty which he so clearly saw, did not appear to him in its unfavorable aspects. Indeed, it somewhat obscured his own view of the freeness of God's grace and of the divine readiness to forgive. His preaching was still too much as if men were to give themselves completely to God, to surrender themselves wholly, to fulfil every condition prescribed by the gospel, and then to remain in entire uncertainty whether, after all, God would bless them or not. He even says, quite in the line of the earlier thought, that fixedness of resolution sufficient to obtain salvation is "not in our power." Certainly, such a strain of remark as the following was not eminently calculated to encourage the hearer to action:

You must not think much of your pains, and of the length of time; you must press towards the kingdom of God, and do your utmost, and hold out to the end, and learn to make no account of it when you have done. You must undertake the business of seeking salvation upon these terms, and with no other expectation than this, that if ever God bestows mercy, it will be in his own time; and not only so, but also that when you have done all, God will not hold himself obliged to show you mercy at last.

Not encouraging, certainly, in its outcome is this passage; and yet there is an appeal to "press" and "do" and "hold out," which has a ring anticipatory of later and better preaching; and this tone of exhortation to action which sounded through all Edward's preaching--the thrilling, intense activity of his ardent soul--this it was which moved men to repentance and conversion, and this first actually broke down the doctrine of inability. That doctrine has never played any actual part in the thinking of men in times of real revival.

Evidently, then, the thinker and reformer has not yet come to his full strength. There is a promise, but still little present exercise, of the powers of a great intellectual leader. It is the instinctive working of a great mind which we see here, rather than the well-planned efforts of one who had surveyed the field and fully comprehended his task.

The external history of the revival does not concern us here. Its vicissitudes, the interruption which it suffered until renewed under the agency of Whitefield, the abundant labors of Edwards at home and abroad, the abnormal phenomena attending it, however interesting, are all matters aside from our present purpose. It called out intense opposition from many moderate men among the New England clergy, of whom the most prominent was Charles Chauncy, minister of the First Church in Boston, who wrote several tracts against it, among them his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743). The divine character and the religious worth of the revival were denied, and hence Edwards felt called upon to come to its defense. In a large measure he became the historian of the great spiritual upheaval. He was also led to the production of a work which was designed to lay the foundation for more solid and successful labor in the field of practical religion by removing the obscurity which overhung the nature of true religion, and by setting forth the distinguishing notes of that virtue which is acceptable in the sight of God. It was entitled A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, and was an exceedingly thorough affair. In a sense it may be regarded as the full presentation of the ideas which had formed the substance of the sermon upon illumination of 1734. It rests upon the conception of the nature of virtue which was elaborated in the treatise of 1755, and it is involved in some of the confusion which marked the first principles of the treatise upon the will. It will therefore require some attention at a later point in the study of the history of Edwards' ideas, but is of the first importance in immediate connection with the review of his services in the period now under consideration, since it is the chief illustration of his entire accord with the spiritual side of the Westminster theology to which notice has already been drawn.

"True religion, in great part," says Edwards, "consists in holy affections." What the affections are he does not clearly define, for though distinguishing between what are called in the better phraseology of modern days, volitions, and the emotions proper, he blurs the distinction and refuses to acknowledge that there are two distinct faculties of the mind here concerned. His thought, stated in modern language, is, however, clearly this, that religion consists in the holy choice of the will accompanied by the lively play of the appropriate emotions. Having established this point, he goes on to discuss most searchingly some supposed signs of true religion which are no certain evidences of its existence. It is, for example, no sign that religious affections are "truly gracious" that they are "very great," or that they have "great effects upon the body," or that they cause fluency or fervor, or that they are "not excited by us," or "come with texts of Scripture," or that their subjects have great confidence; etc., etc. And then he passes to the positive treatment of the theme, in which he follows the lines of his former sermon. Truly spiritual affections arise from supernatural operations on the heart; their object is the excellency of divine things "as they are in themselves;" they are founded on the moral excellency of divine things; they arise from divine illumination; they are attended with a conviction of the reality and certainty of divine things; and their fruit are tempers of heart and courses of life that are manifestly truly Christian.

In the course of the treatise many incidental definitions are thrown out which add much to the clearness of the general thought above that of the former discussion. The sense of divine things which the true Christian has, is unfolded at some length, and is condensed in the following definition: "A new foundation laid in the nature of the soul for a new kind of exercises of the same [i. e., the original] faculty of the understanding." But when Edwards comes to the peculiar certainty which the Christian has of the truth of divine things, he is particularly clear and valuable. He says:

It is evident that there is a spiritual conviction of the truth, or a belief peculiar to those who are spiritual, who are regenerated, and who have the Spirit of God, in his holy communications, dwelling in them as a vital principle. A view of the divine glory directly convinces the mind of the divinity of these things. They therefore that see the stamp of this glory in divine things, they see divinity in them, they see God in them, and so see them to be divine; because they see that in them wherein the truest idea of divinity consists. Thus a soul may have a kind of intuitive knowledge of the divinity of the things exhibited in the gospel; not that he judges the doctrines of the gospel to be from God without any argument or deduction at all; but it is without any long chain of arguments; the argument is but one and the evidence direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but one step, and that is its divine glory. The gospel of the blessed God does not go abroad a begging for its evidence so much as some think: it has its highest and most proper evidence in itself.

And he further adds, with reference to the importance of this argument:

Unless men may come to a reasonable solid persuasion and conviction of the truth of the gospel by internal evidences in the way that has been spoken, viz., by a sight of its glory, it is impossible that those who are illiterate and unacquainted with history should have any thorough and effectual conviction of it at all . . . After all that learned men have said to them, there will remain innumerable doubts on their minds; they will be ready, when pinched with some great trial of their faith, to say, "How do I know this or that? How do I know when these histories were written? Learned men tell me these histories were so and so attested in their day; but how do I know that there were such attestations then? . . . But the gospel was not given, only for learned men . . . It is unreasonable to suppose that God has provided for his people no more than probable evidences of the truth of the gospel . . . And if we come to fact and experience, there is not the least reason to suppose that one in a hundred of those who have been sincere Christians and have had a heart to sell all for Christ, have come by their conviction of the truth of the gospel this way (viz. by external arguments] . . . And indeed, it is but very lately that these arguments have been set in a clear and convincing light even by learned men themselves: and since it has been done, there never were fewer thorough believers among those who have been educated in the true religion. Infidelity never prevailed so much in any age as in this wherein these arguments are handled to the greatest advantage.

Edwards did not neglect the external arguments, as Calvin had not; but we see here clearly that he placed the weight of argument where it should be, in the inner certainty of the specific Christian experience. This was the trend of the Westminster confession; and under Edwards' influence it maintained itself for a generation longer in New England. Under what influences it gave place to the purely external treatment of the subject which was characteristic of the middle of the present century, the history of the Unitarian controversy will clearly reveal.

The last important work owing its origin immediately to the results of the revival was the Qualifications for Communion. Edwards had at first followed unquestionably in the path marked out by his grandfather Stoddard, and admitted to the communion without special examination as to evidences of conversion upon the part of the communicant. But he discovered a bad moral condition in the community affecting its younger members, some of whom were communicants; and the resistance which was made by prominent families to necessary discipline led him to examine the subject with care, and he soon adopted the original position of the New England churches and determined to admit none to communion who were not "ostensible" Christians. His attempts to carry out his new views in practice led to his dismissal from his pastorate, and to the preparation of this treatise in defense of himself before his people. He thereby laid the foundation for the general practice of Congregationalists for more than a century.

His proposition, carefully guarded, is that none should be admitted to the Lord's Supper but "such as are in profession and in the eye of the church's Christian judgment godly or gracious persons." He does not seek to secure infallibly the actual possession of saving grace in every communicant, for that would involve on the part of the church the power of reading men's hearts; but there should be what is now phrased a "credible profession." The arguments he employed are these:

None ought to be admitted as members of the visible church of Christ but visible and professing saints. All who are capable of it are bound to make an explicit and open profession of the true religion. The profession should be of real piety [against the idea of professing a belief in Christianity in general without a profession of personal faith in Christ]. There is no good reason why the people of God should not profess a proper respect to Christ in their hearts as well as a true notion of him in their heads . . . The teachings of Christ, the practice of the primitive church, and the Scriptures in general, require it.

He modestly but strongly refutes the position of Mr. Stoddard, saying that the natural tendency of the Lord's Supper to move the heart and lead to conversion is no proof that this was its designed object, and finally strikes at the root of the whole Half-Way system by saying, in effect, that the things which baptism and the Lord's Supper signify do not exist in the case of the unregenerate, and hence to bestow the badges of repentance and forgiveness upon such persons is an empty and dishonoring honor.

The importance of the practical service rendered by the Qualifications for Communion can scarcely be overestimated. It is too evident to need long discussion here. Its influence in the doctrinal sphere, though indirect, was permanent and broad. Wherever there were "Edwardeans," after there came to be a distinctively Edwardean school, evidences of regeneration were scrutinized with care, and a consequent emphasis was laid upon the doctrine of regeneration, and upon the allied doctrines of the will, and of virtue, and of sin, which form the great staple of New England discussion. It is probable that Edwards' practical work as a revivalist and a faithful and scrupulous pastor had as great an influence upon the future of his native province as that which he did in his study by the methods of the philosophic divine. Yet in the providence of God he was to do both works; and the separation from Northampton, which was so unjust, and which cost him so much anguish, was the divine means of transplanting him to the desolate and distant Stockbridge, where his mind, released from most of the interruptions of active life, was at leisure to bring forth out of its treasure-house things new and old. To this period, the loftier and greater in its results for American religious thought, the history now turns.

 

 

 

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