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TOPIC: Edwards, Jonathan - Rational Biblical Theology (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: Chapt 05 Reason and Revelation
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As a transition to Edwards’ rational biblical theology proper I will note briefly his general theory of the relation of reason and revelation.
Basic to any discussion of Edwards’ view of revelation is his understanding of reason. *1* Reason comes first in thinking just as it does in existence. Revelation is subsequent in thought as well as in being. *2*
While Edwards states in Miscellany M 1337 that “the light of nature is in no sense whatsoever sufficient to discover [reveal] this religion [Christianity],” he also writes that “there is perfect harmony” between reason and *Rev_3:1-22* This perfect harmony is not spelled out in any one work, but scattered indications are everywhere. He mentions often the role reason plays in supporting and fulfilling revelation. We may list four distinct functions of reason. *4*
Before doing this I must take aim at the prevailing modern view of reason and revelation in Jonathan Edwards. Rather than state it myself I will let one of its leading representatives do it better than I could and with more authority. Norman Fiering is typical of the general modern scholarly opinion on this subject. He articulates it with a precision so fine that I do not hesitate to present it here in its scholarly fulness, including even the footnotes.
Yet Edwards’ real immersion in philosophy was recognized even before he had published his major philosophical works. As early as 1743 Charles Chauncy noticed that although Edwards quickly accused others of making “philosophy” rather than Holy Scriptures their rule of judging religious experience, especially “the philosophical notions . . . of the nature of the self, its faculties and affections,” Edwards himself had “made use of more philosophy . . . than anyone that I know of, who has wrote upon the times.” *5* Chauncy’s observation went straight to the mark. However reluctantly and unwittingly, Edwards was inevitably drawn into philosophical debate. Reliance on the theological tradition alone, on scriptural exegesis, on pietistic affirmations, or on pre-Cartesian thought would have been tantamount to excluding oneself from the terms in which the central issues of the time were being fought out. But at the same time, Edwards’ moral theology flatly posited that no matter what could be shown about the so-called virtuous capacities of unredeemed human nature, natural virtue must fall short of “true virtue,” if for no other reason than that it is natural rather than divinely inspired. On this point Edwards was quite explicit: “It is evident,” he wrote, “that true virtue must chiefly consist in love to God.” *6* True virtue is, “in other words, true grace and real holiness.” *7* In the end, therefore, in Edwards’ moral theology true virtue is indistinguishable from the state of grace or regeneration.
This unacknowledged double standard spread confusion in Edwards’ own time and continues to do so. In the face of the epochal religious crisis of the eighteenth century, Edwards sometimes seems to have been inventing his own rules of debate and evidence. For the pietists such as Ames and Mastricht, compartmentalization of moral knowledge into natural and supernatural (or into philosophy and theology) was unacceptable in principle. Morality in theory and in practice was simply the unified Christian life. But by Edwards’ day the expansion of philosophical speculation and understanding both in the physical and the moral sciences had been tremendous, and the task of integration had become so complicated and difficult that few thinkers even attempted to hold religious and secular learning together, except in the vaguest and most general terms. With the Aristotelian synthesis in ruins, it was far easier to take refuge in a loose syncretism. Yet a work like Bayle’s Dictionary pitted religion and philosophy against each other in paradox after paradox, contradiction after contradiction, driving readers either toward fideism or skepticism.
Edwards’ efforts at integration, at system building, as it were, made him an anomaly in the mid-eighteenth century. His intertwining of metaphysics and Scripture, his evangelical ambitions, indeed, the very foundation of his work in the experience of man’s dependence upon God, are reminiscent of a period in philosophy earlier even than that of the great Anglican bishops Joseph Butler and George Berkeley. As we have earlier noted, Edwards belongs properly in the company of Leibnitz, Malebranche, and Pascal fifty years earlier, figures who like him philosophized freely, but did so within a dogmatic tradition. It is a moot point whether this kind of relation to religious dogma excludes one from the Enlightenment. *8*
This is precise - precisely wrong. I think Fiering is even wrong about the stance of Ames, Mastricht and Leibnitz. I know and will show that he, and with him the prevailing contemporary view on Jonathan Edwards, is wrong. In fact, this error is merely another - but for us here the most important - illustration of reading Christian history through fideistically-colored glasses. Not seeing the general historic consensus shown earlier in these pages, many modern scholars assume its non-existence and when unable to deny or explain its presence in an important writer, see it as an anomaly and, in the case of Edwards, an occasional and unconscious anomaly.
As the reader follows the points below he cannot, I think, doubt that there is “integration” in Edwards and that is not “reluctantly and unwittingly” nor by a “double standard” of authority, “flatly” posited by a Jonathan Edwards “following his own rules of debate and evidence.”
1. Reason must prove the existence of God, the Revealer.
It is clear that for Edwards man’s reason - even fallen reason - can and does prove the being of God independently of special revelation. We remind the reader again of Miscellany M 1340, Edwards’ most thorough demonstration of “the insufficiency of reason as a substitute for revelation,” claiming that “Nothing is more certain than that there must be an unmade and unlimited being.” God is the Alpha and the Omega of the rational process. There is no thought that does not lead to God. Atheism is the ultimate absurdity. *9*
In a manuscript sermon on the inspired Scriptures we read this preface: “[R]eason is to determine that there is a God and that he is an infinitely perfect being and that the Scripture is his Word.” *10* This point is seldom noticed in Edwards, his emphasis on reason being eclipsed by the even greater stress which he places on revelation. For example, the 1Co_2:11-13 sermon so stresses the preaching of the “dictated” Word of God and not man’s own wisdom that one is barely conscious of the almost incidental reminder that man’s own reason must first prove the dictated revelation to be from God. Likewise, all readers of the Mat_16:17 sermon are so impressed with the necessity of the divine and supernatural light that they do not hear Edwards quietly observing, negatively, that this does not preclude the use of natural faculties such as reason. *11* He also insists explicitly that the foundational doctrine of revelation, the trinity, is visible to “naked reason.” *12*
2. Reason must demonstrate the rational consistency of revelation.
Edwards, for all his subtlety and penetration, is a typical eighteenth-century apologist. Indeed, he may even be called a typical nineteenth-century apologist. The nineteenth-century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge, for example, takes essentially the same steps as Edwards in discussing the function of reason in *Rev_13:1-18* What Hodge calls the usus organicus (organic use) is our third point: Reason must grasp, perceive, or understand what the purported revelation is saying, if anything. *14* Our present point is Hodge’s view of reason as making trials or tests of contradiction (judicium contradictionis). Reason, having grasped the message, must then determine whether it is coherent or believable - that is, noncontradictory. *15* For the orthodox, who strive for rationality and consistency, contradiction is fatal to truth or even meaning. It is the modern neo-orthodox theologians who call for a “crucifixion of the intellect.” Emil Brunner takes the ultimate anti-orthodox position that contradiction is the very test of religious truth: “The hallmark of logical inconsistency clings to all genuine pronouncements of faith.” *16*
Edwards is orthodox, not neo-orthodox. For him, contradiction is the hallmark of nonsense. If consistency is, as Emerson claims, the “hobgoblin of little minds,” Jonathan Edwards is the most small-minded American philosopher-theologian. According to Edwards, it is not wise but wicked men who are inconsistent: “Wicked men are inconsistent with themselves.” *17* This sermon on Mat_11:16-19 is Edwards’ manifesto of a rational kingdom. Written in it is his counterpart to Henry Dodwell’s Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1742).
Putting the whole matter more succinctly: The Bible “shines bright with the amiable simplicity of truth.” *18* Not only is all that is found in Scripture true, but there are no sound views maintained outside that are not derivative from the Bible. Where the Scriptures have come there has been light; all the rest of the world has remained in darkness: “So ’tis now all over the world,” he told his little Indian congregation on the edge of the wilderness. *19*
3. Reason gives a “case” for Revelation.
Although Edwards nowhere uses Locke’s expression “credentials of a messenger” *20* he clearly shares that viewpoint. That is, he too holds that God’s certifying a messenger establishes that person’s right to propose divine doctrine that must be recognized as such by his hearers. The certification which God gives His commissioned messenger is the power of doing miracles in His name. When God reveals Himself by human messengers He certifies them by miraculous attestation. It is especially clear that Jesus’s miracles attest a divine messenger. Edwards writes of the raising of Lazarus:
Now can it be imagined that God would hear an imposter or so order or suffer it that so extraordinary a thing should be done immediately in consequence of the word & act of an imposter upon his asking it of him who was so impudent, when he asked it as to call him Father and tell him that he always heard him & tell him that he spoke thus for this end that others might see that he did indeed give a testimony to his mission & authority by doing of it at his request in such a manner? *21*
Miracles are sometimes in view when they are not specifically mentioned. When, for example, Edwards observes that the Bible prevails though the might of the world is often against it, he apparently sees the survival of Scripture itself as a miracle - a kind of literary burning bush. *22* The liberal Arminian, Thomas Chubb, may have thought miracles improbable and the deist John Toland may have thought them impossible, but for Jonathan Edwards miracles had thoroughly established the Bible; so well, in fact, that any subsequent miracles - if there were any - could not compare with them. The testimony of Scripture was greater, therefore, than one rising from the dead. “The warnings of God’s word are more fitted to obtain the ends of awakening sinners and bringing them to repentance than the rising of one from the dead to warn them.” *23*
4. Revelation may appear absurd at first glance, but it is rational enough when examined. *24*
In fact, it is revelation that teaches men to grow up and be rational. At this point Edwards tells the story of the thirteen-year-old boy to whom he stated a simple geometrical fact, well known to adults but utterly incredible to the child. *25* Adults having rational difficulties with the Bible were intellectual babies.
Of course, the biblical revelation is mysterious. When the deist John Toland wrote his Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) he did not, in Edwards’ (as in John Locke’s) opinion, maturely understand the reasonableness of mystery in revelation. Edwards constantly defends believing the mysterious. “It is not necessary that persons should have clear ideas of the things that are the subject of a proposition in order to their being rationally convinced of the truth of the proposition.” *26* He argues that even the heathen knew better than to be confined to the Cartesian principle that certainty can only come by clear and distinct ideas.
There is no justification in Edwards’ theology for Conrad Cherry’s statement: “The Scriptures . . . become the Word of God only through the power of God’s Spirit.” *27* Even the devil knows that the Bible is the Word of God. Edwards nowhere says or infers that the Bible is not the Word of God unless the reader is illumined by the Holy Spirit, (though through the Spirit’s illumination the reader does indeed “know,” in the fullest sense, or is “persuaded” that the Bible is the Word of God). Edwards specifically argues in the Heb_5:12 sermon that people are to study the Word of God whether they are illumined or not. As we shall see in the next section, Edwards believed that unregenerate readers do not see the “excellency” of the Word of God - but this is not to say that they do not see that the Bible is the Word of God, which even wicked devils see.
However, there are, according to Edwards, at least four basic limitations of human reason. First, it cannot make the knowledge of God “real” to unregenerate man. Second, it cannot yield a supernatural, salvific revelation or even a “sense” of it. Third, if it recognizes a revelation, it cannot thereafter determine what that revelation may and may not contain. Fourth, reason cannot “comprehend” divine revelation.
Arminians think more highly of man than they ought, and their apologists suppose that man’s reasoning is sound enough to bring him to God. This is not Edwards’ opinion, however. The Calvinistic Edwards finds fallen men quite capable of seeing the truth they do not love and therefore rejecting it even as they formulate it. As one nineteenth-century Edwardsian Calvinist, W. G. T. Shedd, put it: “The approbation of goodness is not the love of it.” *28* Reason does not necessarily lead us to righteousness. There is no salvation without reason but there is reason without salvation. Nor does it necessarily lead us out of every theological problem. There are apparent theological discrepancies in Scripture which Edwards cannot reconcile and which he does not suppose that God expects man to be capable of reconciling. In natural theology, no less than revealed theology, the conception of infinity, for example, is utterly baffling to Edwards. Therefore “to reject everything but what we can first see to be agreeable to our reason tends by degree to bring everything relating not only to revealed religion but even natural religion into doubt.” *29* It follows that, although revelation must be demonstrable, the attempt to make it always “comprehensible” would “tend at last, to make men esteem the science of religion as of no value, and so totally neglect it; and from step to step it will lead to skepticism, atheism, ignorance, and at length to barbarity.” *30* Thus, according to Edwards, too great a demand for understanding leads at last to no understanding. Reason is a useful and necessary tool for any serious thinker, though the human mind must be satisfied with its limitations.
In conclusion, let me address the inevitable question of why there is so much misunderstanding of Edwards among competent, candid scholars of considerable erudition. There is, first, a confusion between the argumentative temper and the dogmatic temper. Second, there is a slight haziness in Edwards himself at certain points.
It is imagined that when a thinker asserts anything dogmatically, that is as a dogma, he is necessarily fideistic and when he argues anything he is necessarily uncertain and undogmatic. Only by arbitrary faith, it is assumed, can anyone be dogmatic or certain.
This is where Edwards - and the general Christian tradition - is basically misunderstood. Edwards certainly argues in the realm of nature and natural virtue as Fiering correctly observes, but Edwards also argued for the fact of revelation and for the rationality of its doctrines. There is no double standard, one area being open to argument and the other sacrosanct. To be sure, once the Bible by argument is proven to be the Word of God there can be no more argument about the infallible authority of all of its message. Anyone at any time may return to the argument for biblical inspiration and the argument must be vindicated in the arena of debate or withdrawn. So said Jonathan Edwards and so said and says, (with a very weak voice today), the general historic Christian tradition.
On this “haziness” of Edwards at certain points I refer to my rather full discussion in a later chapter and that dealing with “Mystery” as well. Here I need only say that Edwards’ position is nonetheless as clear as a sunrise when shining through some scattered morning fog.
This emphasis of Edwards on revelation (Bible) has always disturbed the rationality of those who cannot accept the inspiration of the Bible. George Gordon has written, “It is not edifying to see Edwards, in the full movement of speculation, suddenly pause, begin a new section of his essay, and lug into his argument proof texts from every corner or the Bible to cover the incompleteness of his rational procedure.” *31* Peter Gay has very recently written that Edwards was in a biblical “cage” and not a true son of the Enlightenment. *32* Perry Miller, more than any other student of the Enlightenment, has admired the intellectuality of Jonathan Edwards. Miller sensed that in many ways Edwards was not only abreast of our times but ahead of them. Nevertheless, he felt Edwards was a reactionary in some respects even to his own age.
This type of criticism goes back to the Deists of the eighteenth century. *33* Matthew Tindal’s “Bible of the Deists,” as it was called, was entitled, Christianity as Old as Creation, or the Gospel, A Republication of the Religion of Nature. *34* For him and all Deists, natural revelation was a sufficient map for the rational voyage of life. Revelation was unnecessary, an impertinence, and unable, in any case, to move beyond unaided reason. Nineteenth-century Gordon and twentieth-century Gay are of the same persuasion. Consequently, all of them lament Edwards, with all his prodigious ability as a philosopher and natural theologian, bowing before the authority of the Scriptures as a little child singing, “Jesus loves me; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” But for Edwards, this attitude was not one of simple piety alone but was also at the same time an attitude of the loftiest rationality. He refuted the Deists not by an appeal to faith but by rational analysis. He did not prove the Deists to be deficient in heart only but soft in the head.
In the preceding chapter I showed how Mattoon Curtis wrongly applied Miscellany M 1340 in his comparison of Edwards and Kant. Here I sketch Edwards’ actual use of the miscellany against Deism. M 1340 carries the title: “The insufficiency of reason as a substitute for revelation.” *35* Tindal’s argument was that reason must not only judge whether there is a revelation but “must be the judge concerning each doctrine and proposition contained in that pretended revelation.” *36* This, says Edwards, is an “unreasonable way of arguing.” *37* The rest of the miscellany lays bare the unreasonableness of Tindal’s reasoning.
Edwards’ fundamental rational argument against Tindal’s proposition is that virtually all reasoning consists “in discovering the truth of a proposition, whose truth does not appear to our reason immediately, or when we consider it alone, . . . but by the help of some other proposition on which it depends.” *38* Indeed there are some propositions from whence an “infinite multitude of other propositions are inferred, and reasonably and justly determined to be true.” *39* Otherwise they could not be known at all.
Edwards cites three specific general propositions from which many truths are deduced. His first example of this principle is that “numberless truths are known only by consequence from that general proposition, that the testimony of our sense may be depended on.” ** The same is true of memory. And a third general proposition on which so much depends is the testimony of history and tradition. One particular deduction is especially interesting and significant:
Even the very existence of a sensible world, which we receive for certain from the testimony of our senses, is attended with difficulties and seeming inconsistences with reason, which are insuperable to the reason at least of most men. For, if there be a sensible world, that world exists either in the mind only, or out of the mind, independent of its imagination or perception. If the latter, then that sensible world is some material substance, altogether diverse from the ideas we have by any of our senses - as colour, or visible extension and figure, which is only the quantity and limitation of these; and so, of all other qualities. But that there should be any substance entirely distinct from any or all of these, is utterly inconceivable. For if we exclude all colour, solidity, or conceivable extension, dimension, and figure, what is there left, that we can conceive of? Is there not a removal in our minds of all existence, and a perfect emptiness of everything?
But if it be said, that the sensible world has no existence, but only in the mind, then the sensories themselves, or the organs of sense, by which sensible ideas are let into the mind, have no existence but only in the mind; and those organs of sense have no existence but what is conveyed into the mind by themselves; for they are a part of the sensible world. And then it will follow, that the organs of sense owe their existence to the organs of sense, and so are prior to themselves, being the causes or occasions of their own existence; which is a seeming inconsistence with reason, that, I imagine, the reason of all men cannot explain and remove. *41*
The general principle being established - that most of what is learned is deduced from general propositions - Edwards insists on the legitimacy and special propriety of this in matters of religion. Incidentally, he has shown the utter “insufficiency of reason as a substitute for revelation.” If reason could not solve even daily mundane problems such as the existence of an external world, how could it ever explain the Trinity or Incarnation, infinite understanding, or eternal duration. “Infinite knowledge,” for example, “implies a perfect comprehensive view of a whole future eternity; which seems utterly impossible.” *42* Again, “if there be an absolute immutability in God, then there never arises any new act in God, or new exertion of himself; and yet there arise new effects which seems an utter inconsistence.” *43* Edwards sums up this point as follows: “And so innumerable other such like mysteries and paradoxes are involved in the notion of an infinite and intelligent being.” *44*
Edwards then concludes the essay by explaining that difficulties in understanding the doctrine of God are to be expected in matters so transcendent. The appearance of such paradoxes which are everywhere present argues for - not against - the revelation and its reliability. Edwards’ parting sally is amusing: If the light of nature were sufficient, as the Deists maintain, why do they bother building schools? *45*
In this way Edwards refuted the Deist’s a priori objection to special revelation. It is unreasonable, he maintained, to question rationally anything taught by revelation, once revelation itself is established. Proceeding from the rationally established general principle that the Bible is the Word of God, sound reason dictates the acceptance of all its teachings. To make these teachings pass tests of reason, once their divine authorship was shown, is as unreasonable as it is impious.
I repeat: there is “integration” in Edwards and that is not “reluctantly and unwittingly” nor by a “double standard” of authority, “flatly” posited by a Jonathan Edwards “following his own rules of debate and evidence.” Whether he succeeds in rationally proving the existence of God and His revelation is for the reader to judge, but there can be no question that he tried to do so.