In the Author’s Preface to his The Freedom of the Will, Jonathan
Edwards wrote,
And I desire it
may be particularly noted, that though I have occasion in the following discourse, often to mention the author of the book entitled, An Essay on the Freedom of the Will,
in God and the Creature, as holding that notion of freedom of will, which I
oppose; yet I don’t mean to call him an Arminian: however in that doctrine he
agrees with Arminians, and departs from the current and general opinion of Calvinists. If the author of that essay be
the same as it is commonly ascribed to, he doubtless was not one that ought to
bear that name. But however good a divine he was in many respects, yet that
particular Arminian doctrine which he maintained, is never the better for being
held by such an one: nor is there less need of opposing it on that account; but
rather is there the more need of it; as it will be likely to have the more
pernicious influence, for being taught
by a divine of his name and character; supposing the doctrine to be wrong, and
in itself to be of an ill tendency.
These remarks are interesting in
several ways.
Who is Edwards referring to?
To Isaac Watts, (1674 – 1745) the
composer of wonderful hymns like ‘There is a green hill far away’, and ‘There
is a land of pure delight’. I don’t know
if Edwards sang them in his church, or in his home, or when he was out riding. How
do we know it was Isaac Watts?
We know because
Watts wrote the book, An Essay on the
Freedom of the Will, in God and the Creature, which Edwards tells his
readers that the view he was to expound in the book, compatibilism, was ‘the
current and general opinion of
Calvinists’. It was not a radical innovation, but the standing position
of his Calvinist contemporaries and forbears. Of whom? One theologian that Edwards
admired was Francis Turretin, and someone he had an even better opinion of was the
Dutch Reformed theologian Petrus von Mastricht. In a letter to his friend and
former student, Joseph Bellamy, he wrote in 1747, some years before his Freedom of the Will was published,
Edwards said ‘But take Mastrict for divinity in general, doctrine, practice and
controversy, or as an universal system of divinity, and it is much better than
Turretin or any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion’.
His father Timothy Edwards and grandfather Solomon Stoddard were pillars of New England
congregationalism. He veered from his grandfather’s views on the ‘half way
covenant’, but no sign that he changed his grandfather’s views on free will.
Scholasticism
It is true that Edwards was
somewhat outspoken on the defects of scholasticism, the mode of theologizing of
his forbears, and so I guess his relatives were in no doubt implicated. For
example he criticized Thomas Chubb who was not
a scholastic, but Edwards thought he used language that was ‘void of distinct
and consistent meaning in all the writings of Duns Scotus, or Thomas Aquinas’.
And he says this ‘instead of the
plain vulgar notion of liberty, which all mankind, in every part of the face of
earth and in all ages, have; consisting in opportunity to do as one pleases;
they have introduced a new strange liberty, consisting in indifference, contingence
and self-determination; by which they involve themselves and others in great
obscurity and manifold gross inconsistence’.’
But this affects the form not the
matter of the question of free will. He wrote
that he himself adopted the language of ‘the vulgar’, everyday language, not of the ‘learned’, in the book. Arminian views of the will depart
from ‘the current and general opinion of
Calvinists’, and so in the book he holds that he was not innovating. Nevertheless,
he tells his reader in the Preface, a person may subscribe to an Arminian view
of the will without being an Arminian.
Watts and Edwards
The second thing we learn from what
Edwards writes in his Preface is that he does not regard a doctrine such as the
nature of free will to act as a foundation
for other doctrines, the necessary and sufficient condition of the doctrines of
a system of orthodoxy. He says about Watts,
‘yet I don’t mean to call him an Arminian: however in that doctrine he
agrees with Arminians, and departs from the current and general opinion of Calvinists.’
This implies, I take it, to take another view than ‘the current and general opinion of
Calvinists’ on the nature of free will and, Edwards seems to think, they are
still entitled to that label, if they subscribe to the remainder.
This opinion I think was similar to
the view of William Cunningham who in his laboured, rather tortured article,
‘Calvin, and the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ (in The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation). By this (I
think) he was to give one in the eye to Sir William Hamilton, the Edinburgh
philosopher, who regarded the Confession as entailing
necessitarianism. ‘Necessitarianism’ is
how determinism was referred to in the nineteenth century. Using extravagant
language, Hamilton believed the Confession held that ‘man has no will, agency,
moral personality of his own so a man
has no free will he was able to do an act for which he is responsible.” This is
not the language of someone who has developed an appetite for understanding what
‘God works all things after the counsel of his will’ means, or who can write
carefully about any view he departs from.
But Cunningham went along with the spirit of this, arguing that a person can consistently be a libertarian as
regards free will, claiming that the will has the metaphysical power of
alternativity, and still be able to subscribe ex animo to the Westminster Confession.
The basis of doctrine
The ‘Watts position’ as we may call
it is the outcome, and a reminder, that the basis of Christian doctrine for a
Protestant is not another doctrine or doctrines, but the relevant biblical
evidence for that doctrine. The revealed
word is the foundation, not any other doctrine.
Such is an inference of what
Edwards says, about Watts. ‘A Harmony A person can have Arminian views about
some central matter, but not be an Arminian. (Of course Edwards had no reason
to think that Watts’s views would develop, until he wrote such books as The Harmony of all the Religions Which God
Ever Prescribed, the Arian Invited to the Orthodox Faith, and Orthodoxy United in Several Reconciling Essays
on the Law and the Gospel, Faith and Works.. The circulation of such titles
contributed in England to the Dissenting Academies’ departure from their
earlier moorings in Calvinism through the eighteenth century.
A second problem
Edwards did not use the word ‘Watts’
once throughout the book, in which Watts’s book was referred to and argued
about often. I wonder why? Watts, who had quite a few American
contacts, was involved in receiving Edwards’s account of revival in a letter to
England. This was Edwards's first effort in publicity in England, indeed in Europe, a letter to Guyse end Colman, each
prominent English dissenters, on the revival in Northampton, who passed it to Watts, and Guyse’s congregation
promised publication. Watts saw it through the press as A Faithful Narrative of The Surprising Work of God, in 1737, by which time the revival was waning, and Edwards’s
Freedom
of the Will was yet to be written, being published in 1754. So plenty of time for
festering. But Marsden in Jonathan
Edwards, A Life, Yale, 2003, missed the significance of the snub of Edwards's not mentioning Watts by name by anonymising him. in referring to Watts’s book on free will. Was Edwards
protecting Watts’s name? But his name
was easy to trace when supplied with the title of his book on free will, and
Edwards readily supplied that. If so, why no 'Watts'?
