Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith

Michael McClenahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409441786
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317110378
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is widely regarded as North America's most influential theologian. Throughout the early decades of his ministry he engaged in a public and sustained debate with 'Arminian' theology, a crusade that contributed significantly to the events of the Great Awakening. This book investigates the contours and substance of this theological war. In establishing a clearer historical context for this polemic, McClenahan seeks to overturn the scholarly consensus that Edwards' own theology was a twisting of the Reformed tradition. By demonstrating that Edwards' interlocutor was the dead English Archbishop, John Tillotson, McClenahan provides the hermeneutical key for many of Edwards' most significant works. Justification by faith is one of the most contested doctrines in contemporary theology and Jonathan Edwards, referred to as America's Augustine, wrote extensively on this area. His is a voice that many people are keen to hear.

Chapter 1
Arminianism in New England

Introduction

In 1726, Cotton Mather, scion of New England’s most famous ecclesiastical family, confidently declared of the Congregational clergy that:

There is no need of Reporting what is the Faith professed by the Churches in New-England. For every one knows, they perfectly adhere to the CONFESSION OF FAITH, published by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, and afterwards renewed by the Synod at the Savoy: And received by the Renowned Kirk of Scotland, The Doctrinal Articles of the Church of England, also, are more universally held and preached in the Churches of New-England, than in any Nation; and far more than in our own. I cannot learn, That among all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian: much less an Arian, or a Gentilist.¹

Less than a decade later, the situation was much less homogeneous. John White of Boston published New England’s Lamentations² and Jonathan Edwards, in Northampton, detected the rise of Arminianism in various places. In one of his most oft-quoted sentences he wrote: ‘About this time began the great noise that was in this part of the country about Arminianism, which seemed to appear with a very threatening aspect upon the interest of religion here.’³ The year in question was 1734, and the chief consequence of Edwards’ concern was his preparation and delivery of two detailed lectures on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The lectures were published in expanded form in 1738 and the preface clearly states that the polemic was focused against ‘a new fashioned divinity’ which set itself against the ‘old Protestant doctrine’ of justification.⁴ The exact nature of this Arminian theology has been the occasion of some confusion, an assessment of which is necessary to clarify the historical context and polemical focus of Edwards’ work. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the evidence surrounding Edwards’ claim that Arminianism was a ‘new fashioned divinity’ opposed to the traditional Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone.

In the first section I outline Perry Miller’s claim that Arminianism in New England was a twisting of traditional Calvinist teaching that opened the door for meritorious human acts within Protestant soteriology. Miller’s work is still widely accepted as axiomatic in studies of the period, but I seek to demonstrate that it relies on both a misreading of Calvin’s theology and the theology of the later ‘Calvinists.’ As Michael McClymond notes in another context, ‘We may be able to go beyond Miller, but we cannot – at least in Edwards studies – go around him.’⁵ In the second section I trace the development of the Church of England in the New England colonies and argue that, in eighteenth-century New England, Arminianism was a pejorative term for the increasing influence of distinctively Anglican expositions of soteriology. In the final section I assess the specific response of Jonathan Edwards and the Hampshire Association of Ministers to the increasing Arminian influence. In particular, I argue that Jonathan Edwards’ discourse Justification by Faith Alone was deliberately written against a specific theological school and I garner the evidence for this foundational claim.

The Miller Thesis

In a number of influential works Perry Miller advances the thesis that Arminianism was embryonic in New England covenant theology and by the early 1730s this covenant or federal theology represented a significant departure from the theology of John Calvin. Although the language of New England theology was still that of European Calvinism, the religious experience of the third and fourth generations of settlers, with the remarkable emphasis on good works and human ability, indicated a fundamental shift in the religious climate.⁶ Miller develops two central themes to establish his view that New England covenant theology represents a considerable ‘revision of Calvinism.’⁷ First, he examines the concept of preparation for conversion, and second, he critically expounds the conditionality of the covenant of grace as developed by seventeenth-century Puritans. That is, he undertakes to study the place of human actions before and after conversion, and to explain their significance within the structures of covenant theology.

Preparation for Salvation: ‘Not a supernatural work’⁸

Gerald Goodwin’s article responding to Miller’s interpretation of New England theology began by stating that ‘Perry Miller built the most pervasively and persuasively influential interpretation of the development of Puritan theology in New England. Virtually all analyses of Puritanism either parallel or incorporate his conclusions.’⁹ Central to Miller’s interpretation of Protestant theology is the place given to the doctrine of preparation for salvation. It is the doctrine of preparation which in Miller’s analysis ‘accelerated the subversion of Calvinism.’¹⁰

Miller’s article ‘“Preparation for Salvation” in Seventeenth-Century New England’ traces the development of the doctrine of preparation through William Perkins, Thomas Hooker, and Thomas Shepherd. He maintains that preparationism is important for the Puritans because ‘[i]n the practical terms of social regulation, their problem was how to excite the people to moral action.’¹¹ Pure Calvinism – that is, the doctrine of Calvin – outlines the immutable decrees of God and the associated doctrines of predestination and election: these topics were represented as the primary and fundamental truths about God. In Miller’s reconstruction those outside the covenant community are presented as morally and spiritually impotent and consequently not encouraged to seek salvation. The doctrine of preparation was a Puritan attempt to retain predestination and human inability, whilst at the same time charging the same people to action and reform. Miller recognized the distinctions which the Puritans developed to avoid the obvious charge of contradiction: they spoke of non-meritorious causes and attributed preparation to divine grace, yet he appears to have viewed such distinctions as remnants of scholastic sophistry rather than a credible explanation of Reformed methodology.¹²

Miller contends that amidst the blurr of technical theological distinctions there is one undeniable point: the ministers of the gospel were preaching to those they believed to be unconverted and they were telling them to do something to put themselves in a position for God to work their salvation. And although they were clever enough to avoid the language and theological formulations of the Arminians, in practice they were instructing people in the same way, and to the same end: ‘[P]reparation was not a supernatural work. All men could achieve it, and all men therefore could be called upon to prepare for grace, thereby to exert themselves in precisely such a course of moral conduct as was required of all the society by the natural covenant.’¹³ Miller concludes that: ‘By the beginning of the eighteenth century, preparation had come to mean for all practical purposes, that every man was able to predispose himself for grace, that his fate was in his own hands, even though grace was given of God.’¹⁴

The Conditionality of the Covenant of Grace

There is a clear development in Miller’s argument concerning the conditionality of the covenant of grace and its significance. His article ‘The Marrow of Puritan Divinity’ begins with an assessment of the situation in the seventeenth century which fits neatly with the view described as ‘Calvin against the Calvinists.’¹⁵ Miller presents the God of Calvin as incomprehensible: ‘He (Calvin) demanded that they (his disciples) contemplate, with steady, unblinking resolution, the absolute, incomprehensible, and transcendent sovereignty of God; he required men to stare fixedly and without relief into the very center of the blazing sun of glory.’¹⁶

This doctrine of God’s incomprehensible glory caused a number of problems for the generations after Calvin. Miller maintains that there was a significant problem with the doctrine of assurance, Calvinists lacked conviction that they were genuinely Christian. He continues:

[N]o grounds for moral ... individual assurance could be devised so long as God was held to act in ways that utterly disregarded human necessities or human logic. In order to know that God will unquestionably save him ... man must know that God is in reality the sort of being who would, or even who will have to, abide by these conditions ... In some sense the transcendent God (of Calvin) had to be chained, made less inscrutable, less mysterious, less unpredictable – He had to be made, again, understandable in human terms.¹⁷

The way the Reformed ‘chained’ this God, argues Miller, was through the development and extension of the ‘covenant of grace.’ The key condition of the covenant of grace was faith in Jesus Christ.¹⁸ After entry into the covenant of grace through faith there was the additional condition of sincere and persevering obedience to the moral law of God. Miller concludes that the outcome of this doctrine was the removal of predestination and the decrees of God from the believer’s line of vision, to be replaced with an assurance of the love and grace of God based on the fulfillment of the conditions of the covenant.¹⁹ Miller’s purpose in explaining the conditionality of the covenant of grace was to demonstrate the movement in later Calvinist thought towards ethical and moral obedience: ‘[these conditions] paved the way for the supreme triumph of the school – the establishment of a code of ethics and of moral obligation.’²⁰

In the New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century Miller allocates a chapter to the development of this interpretation of the covenant of grace. His argument follows similar lines to those outlined in ‘The Marrow of Puritan Divinity’. Significantly he represents the development of the doctrine as a response to both Arminianism and antinomianism. It is evident in Miller’s explanation that although the covenant doctrine was intended as a response to Arminianism, in practice he understood the ultimate end of covenant theology and Arminianism to be the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Arminianism in New England
• 2 Anglican Arminianism
• 3 ‘We are justified only by faith in Christ’
• 4 Proving the Doctrine
• 5 Broader Considerations Concerning Faith and Works
• General Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index