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“Complex Spiritual Ideas”: Edwards, the Spiritual Sense, and Scripture

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Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

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Abstract

Like Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards’ biblical practices and religious experientialism formed amid momentous transformations in philosophy, biblical scholarship, and piety that magnified the experiential and epistemological opposition of nature and spirit. Edwards’ extensive and multifaceted engagement with the Bible has only recently received significant scholarly attention, giving rise to new insights and questions regarding his thought and his times. While he embraced the Reformed Protestant commitment to Scripture’s perspicuity, self-attesting authority, self-interpreting nature, the analogy of faith, and a historical-redemptive framework, he joined Mather in being among the first in British North America to engage seriously in the early developments of critical biblical scholarship. According to Robert Brown, Edwards’ use of historical-critical thinking in service of a more evidentialist-oriented apologetic conflicted with his tradition’s affirmation of Scripture’s self-authenticating authority. At the same time, Stephen Stein and Stephen Nichols, among others, have argued that Edwards’ innovative notion of the regenerate soul’s spiritual sense produced a subjective and arbitrary spiritual hermeneutic that diverged from the Protestant Reformer’s insistence on Scripture’s singular literal sense. Others such as Douglas Sweeney and David Barshinger offer a more moderate assessment, recognizing some idiosyncrasies but ultimately seeing overwhelming continuity between Edwards and his Reformed predecessors. For Sweeney, Edwards “majored in the literal sense,” and the thrust of his biblical interpretation can be categorized into four methods that place him in striking continuity with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed Protestants: canonical (interpreting with an eye to the unity and interconnectedness of the entire Bible), Christological (exploring how every passage points to Christ), redemptive-historical (demonstrating the Bible’s grand narrative of salvation from beginning to end), and pedagogical (mining applicative meaning for the believer’s faith and practice).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Alongside the literature on Edwards’ exegesis cited in the Introduction, see also, among others, Robert E. Brown, “Edwards, Locke, and the Bible,” The Journal of Religion, 79:3 (July, 1999): 361–84; Brown, “The Bible,” in The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Sang Hyun Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 87–102; Brown, “The Sacred and the Profane Connected: Edwards, the Bible, and Intellectual Culture,” in Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. D. Maskell, eds. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 38–53; Brown, “Biblical Exegesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards, Douglas A. Sweeney and Jan Stievermann, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); 370−86; Douglas A. Sweeney, “Jonathan Edwards,” in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 309–12; Sweeney, “‘Longing for More of It’?: The Strange Career of Jonathan Edwards’s Exegetical Exertions,” in Jonathan Edwards at 300, 25–37; Sweeney, “Edwards and the Bible,” in Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian, ed. Gerald R. McDermott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 63–82; Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009); Sweeney, “Exegesis,” in The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, ed. Harry S. Stout (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 208−12; Stephen R. C. Nichols, “Revelation,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 165−82; David P. Barshinger, “Hermeneutics,” in Edwards Encyclopedia, 288−90; Ryan P. Hoselton, “Jonathan Edwards, the Inner Witness of the Spirit, and Experiential Exegesis, Jonathan Edwards Studies, 5:2 (2015): 90−120.

  2. 2.

    See especially Brown, Edwards and the Bible; and Lee, Erosion of Biblical Certainty, 73−81. Some authors regularly consulted by Edwards for historical, geographical, and linguistic insight into Scripture include, among others, Johann Buxtorf, Abraham Trommius, John Taylor, Ephraim Chambers, Arthur Bedford, William Warburton, Humphrey Prideaux, Pierre Bayle, Nathaniel Lardner, Edwards Wells, Jeremiah Jones, and Theophilus Gale. Stein suggests Edwards may have learned of some of these authors through Mather’s recommendations in the Manuductio ad Ministerium, WJE, 24:70. Robert Brown estimates that about one-third of roughly 700 titles listed in Edwards’ “Catalogue of Books” notebook (which he kept from 1722 to 1757, now published in WJE vol. 26) bear on historical and critical study of the Bible. Brown, “The Bible” (2005), 94.

  3. 3.

    Stephen J. Stein, “The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards,” Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977): 99–113; Stein, “‘Like Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver’: The Portrait of Wisdom in Jonathan Edwards’s Commentary on the Book of Proverbs,” Church History 54 (September 1985): 324–37; Stein, “The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); “Edwards as Biblical Exegete,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181–95; Nichols, Edwards’s Bible.

  4. 4.

    Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete, 48, x, and chapters 3−10 unfold these methods. For more on Edwards’ redemptive-historical interpretation, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work’: Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and ‘The Harmony of the Old and New Testament,’” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 52–65; Barshinger, Edwards and the Psalms; Nichols, Edwards’s Bible; and Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete, 53–75, 137–59.

  5. 5.

    For Edwards’ connection to another Reformed creed, the Heidelberg Catechism, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “‘Our Confused Way of Church Government’: Jonathan Edwards, the New England Way, and the Heidelberg Catechism,” in Profil und Wirkung des Heidelberger Katechismus, ed. Christoph Strohm and Jan Stievermann (Göttingen: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 2015), 330−42.

  6. 6.

    Catalogues of Books, WJE, 26:105. For more on Edwards’ use of Owen, see Stephen J. Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE, 2:68–69. Edwards also cited Owen’s Pneumatica and An Exposition of The Epistle to the Hebrews in “Blank Bible,” WJE, 24:361, 410. Edwards would have encountered similar theologies of Scripture in other European Reformed writers, such as Johannes Wolleb (1589−1629), Richard Sibbes (1577−1635), Petrus van Mastricht (1630−1706), and Francis Turretin (1623−1687).

  7. 7.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:278.

  8. 8.

    See Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE, 2:53−57.

  9. 9.

    For more on the Edwards’ family background, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Edwardses: A Ministerial Family in Eighteenth-Century New England” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1988); Ava Chamberlain, “Family Life,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 3−16; and George Marsden, “Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 33−50.

  10. 10.

    See Philip F. Gura, “Sowing for the Harvest: William Williams and the Great Awakening,” Journal of Presbyterian History 56:4 (Winter 1978), 326−41.

  11. 11.

    WJE, 16:29.

  12. 12.

    WJE, 4:146.

  13. 13.

    Solomon Stoddard, A Guide to Christ. Or, the Way of Directing Souls that Are Under the Work of Conversion (Boston: J. Allen, 1714), 9. Other important works by Stoddard and Williams that represent his approach to religious reform include The Nature of Saving Conversion, and the Way Wherein it is Wrought (Boston: James Franklin, 1719); The Defects of Preachers Reproved, in a Sermon Preached at Northampton, May 19th, 1723 (New London, CT: T. Green, 1724); William Williams, The Great Salvation Revealed and Offered in the Gospel (Boston, 1717); and The Great Concern of Christians (Boston, 1723). See Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 37–97.

  14. 14.

    George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 141−43.

  15. 15.

    David W. Kling, “Edwards in the Context of International Revivals and Missions,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 51−68.

  16. 16.

    Marsden, Edwards, 62; Peter J. Thuesen, “Edwards’ Intellectual Background,” in Princeton Companion to Edwards, 19−21. As scholars have noted, Dummer’s gift was one of the more dramatic symbols of provincial New England’s participation in the transatlantic “republic of letters,” which embodied an emphasis on rational Christianity combined with a latitudinarian spirit and polite style. See Norman Fiering, “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned Periodicals to Early Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 642−60.

  17. 17.

    The literature on Edwards and the Enlightenment is extensive; see, among other studies, John E. Smith, “Puritanism and Enlightenment: Edwards and Franklin,” in Knowledge and Belief in America, Shea and Huff, eds., 195−226; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Fiering, “The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards’s Metaphysics,” in Edwards and the American Experience, Stout and Hatch, eds.; Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Allen C. Guelzo, “Edwards, Jonathan,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), I.390−92; Avihu Zakai, “The Age of Enlightenment,” in Cambridge Companion to Edwards, ed. Stein, 80−99; Marsden, Edwards, chs. 4, 27, 28; Rivett, Science of the Soul, ch. 6; Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy Before Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8−47; Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete, 25−26, 271−77.

  18. 18.

    The biographies by Ian Murray and Perry Miller are representative of the first two images, respectively. Thuesen, though laying stress on the eclectic nature of Edwards’ thought, also introduces this language of “tension” and “torn” between premodern and modern thought worlds. See Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (1949; reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Ian H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987); and Thuesen, “Intellectual Background,” 16−17, 20−21.

  19. 19.

    See, among others, William Sparkes Morris, The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1991); and Thuesen, “Intellectual Background,” 23. Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott demonstrate how Edwards’ theology is too eclectic to boil down to a single dominant motif, despite the attempts of many to do so. Michael J. McClymond, Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–10.

  20. 20.

    See Ryan P. Hoselton, “Experientialism,” Edwards Encyclopedia, 212−15.

  21. 21.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:452. See Harrison, “Experimental Religion and Experimental Science,” 432.

  22. 22.

    Original Sin, WJE, 3:167−68.

  23. 23.

    For more on how Edwards’ sermons from his New York pastorate in 1722−1723 prefigured central aspects of his thought and ministry in later years, see Wilson H. Kimnach, “Jonathan Edwards’ Early Sermons: New York, 1722−1723,” Journal of Presbyterian History (1962−1985) 55.3 (Fall 1977): 155−66; Karin Spiecker Stetina, “The Biblical-Experimental Foundations of Jonathan Edwards’ Theology of Religious Experience, 1720−1723” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2003). McClymond and McDermott see an “experiential-empirical turn” in Edwards’ thinking in the mid- to late 1730s when he took to recording detailed observations of the empirical manifestations of religious experiences associated with the outbreak of revivals. I suggest there was not necessarily a “turn” in his thinking but rather a culmination and outworking of ideas that preoccupied him in the early 1720s. McClymond, McDermott, Theology of Edwards, 78−80.

  24. 24.

    For more on Edwards’ philosophical and scientific thought, see Wallace E. Anderson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, WJE, 6:1−136; quote from p. 47; Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (London: T & T Clark, 2010); Zakai, “The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 324−36. Jonathan Edwards’ father Timothy shared some of his observational findings on pumpkin vegetation with Judge Paul Dudley, a member of the Royal Society, who then cited Timothy’s observations in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1724. This prompted Jonathan to submit his “Spider Letter” to Dudley for publication, but with no success.

  25. 25.

    Robert Brown notes, with the exception of Matthew Tindal, that Edwards’ exposure to Spinoza and deist literature came primarily through secondary sources. Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 35, n. 27. McDermott argues that Edwards encountered deist ideas and challenges from a young age, and he estimates that Edwards devoted twenty-five percent of his Miscellanies directly or indirectly to addressing these challenges. McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 39.

  26. 26.

    See Hindmarsh, Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 127−35; Oliver D. Crisp and Kyle C. Strobel, Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 67−89.

  27. 27.

    Edwards, “Diary,” WJE, 16:759. Later in Religious Affections, Edwards borrows from Shepard to argue that the Spirit’s operation on the soul—though it often appears like “confused chaos”—varies greatly from person to person and therefore religious experience should not be “strained” into “exact conformity to the scheme” of salvation and sanctification prescribed by certain ministers. Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE, 2:161−62. See also “Miscellanies,” no. 899, WJE, 20:156. For more on the differences between Puritan and evangelical views on experiential assurance, see Brekus, Osborn’s World, 95−104.

  28. 28.

    Miller, Edwards, 62. See Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” Harvard Theological Review 41, no. 2 (1948): 121–45, and Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1964), 167–83. Cf. George Marsden, “Perry Miller’s Rehabilitation of the Puritans: A Critique,” Church History 39, no. 1 (March 1970): 91–105; Edwards: A Life, 60–64; Fiering, “Edwards’s Metaphysics,” and Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought.

    For studies that address the influence, similarities, and differences between Locke and Edwards, see, among others, Claude Smith, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘The Way of Ideas,’” Harvard Theological Review 59, no. 2 (1966): 153–73; Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1969): 51–61; Helm, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and The Religious Affections,” Jonathan Edwards Studies 6.1 (2016), 3−15; David Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” Early American Literature 15, no. 2 (Fall, 1980): 107–23; James Hoopes, “Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Psychology,” Journal of American History 69, no. 4 (1983): 849–65; Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, especially p. 48; and Caroline Schröder, Glaubenswahrnehmung und Selbsterkenntnis: Jonathan Edwards’ theologia experimentalis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 122−41. Robert Brown has reassessed the relationship between Edwards and Locke in light of Edwards’ exegetical work in “Edwards, Locke, and the Bible” and Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. McClymond offers a helpful summary and assessment of responses to Miller without marginalizing the importance of Locke’s influence on Edwards. Michael J. McClymond, “Spiritual Perception in Jonathan Edwards,” The Journal of Religion 77, no. 2 (April 1997): 195–216.

    Pushing back against the argument that the Enlightenment gave rise to evangelicalism, Hindmarsh rightly shows that Edwards’ devotional Bible reading commitments underlay his resistance to naturalist Enlightenment philosophies. Cf. Hindmarsh, “Lectio Evangelica,” 48−54.

  29. 29.

    WJE, 13:177.

  30. 30.

    See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 104−21, 163−66 (Book II, chapters 1−2, 12).

  31. 31.

    WJE, 6:390.

  32. 32.

    WJE, 6:369.

  33. 33.

    WJE, 14:80.

  34. 34.

    Owen, Understanding the Mind of God, 4:155–56. See William J. Wainwright, “Jonathan Edwards and His Puritan Predecessors,” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 224−40.

  35. 35.

    WJE, 18:458, 452, 458, 461, 458.

  36. 36.

    WJE, 18:462, 459.

  37. 37.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:282.

  38. 38.

    WJE, 18:462−64. In his communion controversy, Edwards drew from Locke’s approach to ideas and language and its implications for church life. Edwards argued for the necessity of true rebirth to make a profession of faith and partake in the sacraments. If one was not truly reborn, Edwards argued, he or she lacked real ideas of what was signified in a proper profession of faith and thus could only speak the words as mere signs with no true understanding. He explains, “Mr. Locke says, Human Understanding, … ‘He that uses words of any language without distinct ideas in his mind, to which he applies them, does so far as he uses them in discourse, only make a noise without any sense or significations.’” Misrepresentations Handled, and Truth Vindicated, WJE, 12:389n4.

  39. 39.

    Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE, 17:409.

  40. 40.

    WJE, 18:463, 465.

  41. 41.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:205−206.

  42. 42.

    Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE, 17:413.

  43. 43.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 408, WJE, 13:470; WJE, 17:415.

  44. 44.

    WJE, 18:453.

  45. 45.

    WJE, 13:178. See also “Miscellanies,” no. 375, WJE, 13:447−48; and “Miscellanies,” no. 686, WJE, 18:249, both entitled “Spirit’s Witness,” where Edwards expands on the connection between Christian assurance and inward feeling of the Spirit’s operations. A similar line of reasoning is found in Jonathan Dickinson’s 1740 sermon: “As no Idea of sensible Objects can possibly be communicated to those that have not the proper Senses to perceive them; so neither can any just Conceptions of this Fellowship of the Spirit, this Joy of the Holy Ghost, be communicated to any but to those that have had the happy Experience of it in themselves.” Jonathan Dickinson, The Witness of the Spirit (Boston: Kneeland & Green, 1740), 20.

  46. 46.

    See Schaefer, “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE, 13:51. Fiering contends that the debates between New Light and Old Light theologians during the eighteenth-century awakenings in large part paralleled and carried over from seventeenth-century debates between Augustinian voluntarists and intellectualists, situating Edwards in the former in continuity with men like Ames, Owen, and Mastricht. He notes the irony that while Stoddard gained a reputation as a proto-revivalist, his reasoning belonged in the intellectualist camp. While Fiering is right in highlighting this continuity to qualify accounts that attribute incommensurate influence to Locke on Edwards’ psychological theory, I find he underrates the influence of Lockean empirical philosophy. Norman S. Fiering, “Will and Intellect in the New England Mind,” The William and Mary Quarterly 29.4 (Oct., 1972): 551−58.

    Jonathan Yeager explores how two evangelical Calvinists, namely Edwards and John Erskine, a minister in Scotland, utilized Lockean philosophy and biblical exegesis in different ways to advance voluntarist (Edwards) and intellectualist (Erskine) philosophies of the will. Yeager, “Faith, Free Will, and Biblical Reasoning in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards and John Erskine,” in Evangelicals and the Bible, ed. Larsen, 55−73.

  47. 47.

    WJE, 14:84−85.

  48. 48.

    Rivett, Science of the Soul, 282.

  49. 49.

    Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, WJE, 4:386−87.

  50. 50.

    Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 167−83. For a recent essay reviving Miller’s thesis, see Harry S. Stout, “What Made the Great Awakening Great?” in Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism, Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 1−18.

  51. 51.

    WJE, 17:413.

  52. 52.

    Locke, Essay, IV.XIX, 698. See Helm, “Edwards, Locke, and Religious Affections,” 5−7.

  53. 53.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 1337, WJE, 23:342−45.

  54. 54.

    Edwards had consulted Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on First Corinthians, and he explicitly cited him in the entry on 1 Cor 1:28. “Blank Bible,” WJE, 24:1037−38. See also “Light in a Dark World, A Dark Heart,” WJE, 19:719−20; The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth, WJE, 22:83−89; his sermon on 1 Cor 2:11−13, “Ministers to Preach not their own Wisdom but the Word of God [1740],” in Kenneth P. Minkema and Richard A. Bailey, “Reason, Revelation, and Preaching: An Unpublished Ordination Sermon by Jonathan Edwards,” SBJT 3.2 (Summer 1999), 16−33; “Miscellanies,” no. 350, WJE, 13:421; and “Miscellanies,” no. 837, WJE, 20:52−53.

  55. 55.

    Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE, 17:412; Religious Affections, WJE, 2:225.

  56. 56.

    The Threefold Work of the Holy Ghost [1729], WJE, 14:378. This argument saturates his writings in defense of the revivals, like, for example, in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God [1741], WJE, 4:253−54.

  57. 57.

    Charles Chauncey, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (Boston: Rogers & Fowle, 1743), 324. See also Chauncey, A Letter to … Mr. George Wishart…, Concerning the State of Religion in New England (Edinburgh, 1742) 5−15, 17−24, excerpted in Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740−1745 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 116−21.

  58. 58.

    Alexander Garden, Regeneration, and the Testimony of the Spirit. Being the Substance of Two Sermons … (Charlestown, SC: 1740), 1−2.

  59. 59.

    Edwards personally warned Whitefield against relying on “impulses.” See Ava Chamberlain, “The Grand Sower of the Seed: Jonathan Edwards’s Critique of George Whitefield,” New England Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Sept. 1997): 368−85.

  60. 60.

    See Locke, Essay, IV.XIX, 705.

  61. 61.

    “Treatise on Grace,” WJE, 21:177.

  62. 62.

    The implications of Edwards’ dispositionalism for his Trinitarian theology has sparked much debate, mainly among philosophical theologians. While this is not the place to address these discussions in depth, a few points are worth mentioning. I accept the argument of Sang Hyun Lee, Amy Planting Pauw, and others that Edwards saw reality, God, and human psychology as dynamic and relational, but I disagree with certain conclusions these authors have drawn. For instance, I am not convinced by Lee’s thesis that Edwards believed God’s being—as essentially dispositional—could expand. Also contra Lee, I agree with Oliver Crisp, Paul Helm, and others that Edwards did not fully abandon substance metaphysics for a strictly dispositional ontology. From a descriptive historical standpoint, it seems he posited aspects of both (incongruous) ontologies for varying purposes and did not concern himself with reconciling them. See, among others, Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 [1988]), and “Editors Introduction,” WJE, 21:1−108; Anri Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and The Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); Stephen R. Holmes, “Does Jonathan Edwards Use a Dispositional Ontology? A Response to Sang Hyun Lee,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, edited by Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 99−114; Oliver Crisp, “Jonathan Edwards’s Ontology: A Critique of Sang Hyun Lee’s Dispositional Account of Edwardsian Metaphysics,” Religious Studies 46 (March 2010): 1−20; Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Michael McClymond, “Hearing the Symphony: A Critique of Some Critics of Sang Hyun Lee’s and Amy Plantinga Pauw’s Accounts of Jonathan Edwards’s View of God,” in Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee, ed. Don Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 67−92; and Paul Helm, “The Human Self and the Divine Trinity,” ibid., 93−106. For more on the Trinitarian debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and their relationship to Edwards, see Lee, “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE, 21:3−10; and Pauw, Supreme Harmony of All, 21−26. For more on Edwards’ trinitarianism, see, among others, William J. Danaher Jr., The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004); Steven M. Studebaker, Robert W. Caldwell III, The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context and Application (New York: Routledge, 2012); Kyle C. Strobel, “The Nature of God and the Trinity,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 118−34.

  63. 63.

    See Lee, “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE, 21:11; Helm, “The Human Self and the Divine Trinity,” 93−106. In confining this section to the psychological dimensions, I acknowledge that Edwards’ trinitarianism draws from other thought traditions too, like Scholasticism.

  64. 64.

    “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:138, 131, 117, 116, 117, 121, 122, and 133. For more on Edwards’ understanding of the nature and unity of the Trinity, see “Miscellanies,” nos. 308−10, WJE, 13:392−93. See Robert W. Caldwell III, Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007); Caldwell, “Pneumatology,” in Oxford Handbook of Edwards, 151−64.

  65. 65.

    “Treatise on Grace,” WJE, 21:194−95; “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:122; Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE, 17:424; “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:124, 129. See Roland A. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 152−56.

  66. 66.

    “Treatise on Grace,” WJE, 21:158, 191, 156; “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:136−38.

  67. 67.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 686 “Spirit’s Witness,” WJE, 18:249; Religious Affections, WJE, 2:266.

  68. 68.

    See Ray S. Yeo, Renewing Spiritual Perception with Jonathan Edwards: Contemporary Philosophy and the Theological Psychology of Transforming Grace (London: Routledge, 2016), 74−77. Robert Jenson argues that Edwards’ late “Miscellanies,” no. 1338 departs from his earlier understanding of Scripture as a means of communion with God, seeing it now as a direct form of communication between God and creatures. I’m not convinced Edwards intended this. His reasoning seems to be an extension of “Miscellanies,” no 1337 arguing for, as the title states, “the necessity of revelation” against deists like Matthew Tindal and others (he also includes Hobbes, Spinoza, and Lord Bolingbroke) who promote the sufficiency and autonomy of nature, whereas his other earlier writings on this topic (many of which are examined in the current subsection of this study) concern the role of Scripture in producing grace and spiritual knowledge. The entries have different aims, but the argument in this late “Miscellanies” entry doesn’t supplant or contradict what he said before. Edwards, “Miscellanies,” no. 1338, WJE, 23:345−55. Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 187−96.

  69. 69.

    God Makes Men Sensible of Their Misery Before He Reveals His Mercy and Love, WJE, 17:155.

  70. 70.

    Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things Denied to the Unregenerate, WJE, 14:94.

  71. 71.

    Hall, Puritans, 116.

  72. 72.

    Locke, Essay, III.II, 404−408.

  73. 73.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 777, WJE, 18:427−29.

  74. 74.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 182, WJE, 13:329.

  75. 75.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 777, WJE, 18:427−29; “Miscellanies,” no. 182, WJE, 13:329. See also “Miscellanies,” no. 782, WJE, 18:457−58.

  76. 76.

    Christ, The Light of the World, WJE, 10:542−43.

  77. 77.

    Spiritual Understanding, WJE, 14:88−89.

  78. 78.

    See Fiering, “Rationalist Foundations of Edwards’s Metaphysics,” 78−81.

  79. 79.

    Original Sin, WJE, 3:402, emphasis original. See also “Miscellanies,” no. 346, WJE, 13:418. Edwards’ occasionalism qualifies Bebbington’s assessment that Edwards reinterpreted “the sovereignty of God as an expression of the law of cause and effect.” Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 64.

  80. 80.

    By “arbitrary” Edwards did not mean random but rather according to God’s sovereign will as the divine arbiter. See Edwards’ distinction between “natural operations” and “arbitrary operations” in “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, WJE, 23:201−12.

  81. 81.

    “Miscellanies,” nos. 539 and 629, WJE, 18:84, 157; Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE, 17:409, 416. This point may also shed interesting insight on Edwards’ communion controversy, in which he opposed Stoddard’s position that the Lord’s Supper was a “converting ordinance.” For Edwards, the Lord’s Supper had no causal ability to produce grace in the heart or transform one’s character. Edwards, Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated, WJE, 12:407−10. Most Puritan theologians such as John Owen also understood the Spirit to be the efficient cause of saving grace and spiritual knowledge but still retained the Scholastic category of instrumental causation. See John Owen, The Causes, Ways, and Means of Understanding the Mind of God as Revealed in His Word, with Assurance Therein, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 4, ed. William Goold (Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53; reprinted, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2004).

  82. 82.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 539, WJE, 18:88.

  83. 83.

    Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE, 17:417.

  84. 84.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 539, WJE, 18:85−86. The biblical story of Elijah is from 1 Kings 18.

  85. 85.

    Profitable Hearers of the Word of God, WJE, 14:265.

  86. 86.

    Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival [1743], WJE, 387−88.

  87. 87.

    See especially Stoddard, Defects of Preachers Reproved [1723].

  88. 88.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 539, WJE, 18:85−86.

  89. 89.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:115−16.

  90. 90.

    Threefold Work of the Holy Ghost, WJE, 14:433.

  91. 91.

    Edwards, sermon on Exodus 20:24 (Spring-Fall 1729), Box 1, F. 28, Beinecke, pp. 10−11, transcribed in The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Volume 44, Sermons, Series II, 1729 (Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University, 2008). Hereafter WJEO.

  92. 92.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 539, WJE, 18:86−87.

  93. 93.

    Importance and Advantage, WJE, 22:100; “Miscellanies,” no. 539, WJE, 18:87−88.

  94. 94.

    Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God [1741], WJE, 20:400−418.

  95. 95.

    See WJE, 26:21, 130. He also owned a work by Francke that expressed these sentiments, entitled “Letter Concerning the Most Useful Way of Preaching.” Originally a letter, it was translated into English and published with a work on experimental preaching by John Jennings, Two Discourses […] (London, 1736; Boston: J. Draper, 1740). WJE, 26:171.

  96. 96.

    Rivett makes too little of this active and participatory dimension of Edwards’ preaching when she states that he “urged his congregants to resist interpretive form and to remain completely passive through the sensory encounter.” Rivett, Science of the Soul, 302.

  97. 97.

    WJE, 14:72−74.

  98. 98.

    WJE, 13:287. See also “Miscellanies,” no. 239, WJE, 13:354. For more on Edwards’ understanding of the moral state and ability of human nature on its own, see his sermon based on Romans 3:11−12 entitled All That Natural Men Do Is Wrong, WJE, 19:515−36.

  99. 99.

    McClymond, McDermott, Theology of Edwards, 5.

  100. 100.

    “Galatians 5:17” in “Blank Bible,” WJE, 24:1086−87. See also Threefold Work of the Holy Ghost, WJE, 14:378; Original Sin, WJE, 3:380−88.

  101. 101.

    WJE, 14:83.

  102. 102.

    WJE, 13:287.

  103. 103.

    WJE, 13:287. For more on how Edwards’ understanding of the relationship between the disposition of the mind and internal sensation compared with Locke and the Cambridge Platonists, see McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 68−69.

  104. 104.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:217.

  105. 105.

    WJE, 13:287.

  106. 106.

    Spiritual Understanding, WJE, 14:81.

  107. 107.

    WJE, 13:287. See also Edwards, “Miscellanies,” no. 141 (156), WJE, 13:297−98.

  108. 108.

    For more on the dating of these and other early “Miscellanies,” see Schaefer, “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE, 13:75−89, especially 82−83.

  109. 109.

    Miller, “Sense of the Heart,” 127.

  110. 110.

    WJE, 13:289−91.

  111. 111.

    Ava Chamberlain, “Self-Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,” Church History 63:4 (Dec. 1994), 555.

  112. 112.

    “Directions for Judging of Persons’ Experiences,” WJE, 21:523.

  113. 113.

    Edwards cited Stoddard’s Sincerity and Hypocrisy to argue that his stress on the role of the inner senses in establishing assurance did not contradict the voices of divines who laid greater stress on the “visible exercises of grace.” Religious Affections, WJE, 2:454, 424, 452−53, 443, 453−54.

  114. 114.

    “The Mind,” WJE, 6:345.

  115. 115.

    Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6−11. Thiel discusses Edwards’ thoughts on consciousness from Original Sin on pp. 262−65.

  116. 116.

    See William Ames, Conscience With the Power and Cases Thereof … Translated Out of Latine Into English (London, 1639), 3.

  117. 117.

    “Letter 4. Edwards to Gillespie,” WJE, 2:502−504.

  118. 118.

    Leon Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limitations of Enlightenment Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33.

  119. 119.

    Stein, “Quest for the Spiritual Sense,” 109−10, 113.

  120. 120.

    Nichols, Edwards’s Bible, 23, 43. Nichols asserts in a later essay that “Edwards’ approach is not an unprincipled exercise of imagination,” but nonetheless the rules for interpreting Scripture’s spiritual sense, according to Edwards, were “made available only to those indwelt by the Holy Spirit, capable of polyvalence and subject to its own principles of interpretation.” Edwards thought the new spiritual sense in the believer legitimated “a particular freedom in exploring Scripture’s spiritual sense,” and in this respect, argues Nichols, Edwards was an innovator within his Reformed tradition. Nichols, “Jonathan Edwards’ Principles of Interpreting Scripture,” in Edwards and Scripture, 45−46, 50.

  121. 121.

    Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 146.

  122. 122.

    “Notes on Scripture,” WJE, 15:223, 229−30, 150−51.

  123. 123.

    The entry “Spiritual Sense of Scripture” in the Edwards Encyclopedia follows Stein and repeats the same mistake; see Edwards Encyclopedia, 545−47.

  124. 124.

    “Miscellanies,” no. 851, WJE, 20:80.

  125. 125.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:278−79.

  126. 126.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:278.

  127. 127.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:278. Edwards referred to Mark 4:5 and Matt 13:5, Gen 28:10–17, and Josh 3. This point challenges Nichol’s argument that Edwards saw typological interpretation as restricted for those indwelt by the Spirit. Nichols, “Edwards’s Principles of Interpreting Scripture,” in Edwards and Scripture, 46−50.

  128. 128.

    WJE, vol. 4.

  129. 129.

    Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 207−84.

  130. 130.

    On this issue Edwards drew particularly from Thomas Shepard’s Sound Believer: A Treatise of Evangelicall Conversion (London, 1645), and Parable of the Ten Virgins (published posthumously in London, 1660) of which, as John Smith notes, Edwards quoted over two dozen pages. He also cited Solomon Stoddard’s Guide to Christ (Boston, 1714) and Treatise Concerning Conversion (Boston, 1719), and the English Puritan John Flavel, A Discourse of the Occasions, Causes, Nature, Rise, Growth, and Remedies of Mental Errors (London, 1691), and Sacramental Meditations (London, 1679), among other Puritan authors. Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE, vol. 2.

  131. 131.

    As Isabel Rivers shows, inward religion was a contested matter in the revivals, and evangelical leaders encouraged it while also addressing its potential dangers in varying ways. Isabel Rivers, “Inward Religion and its Dangers in the Evangelical Revival,” in Heart Religion, ed. Coffey, 138−55.

  132. 132.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:208−213.

  133. 133.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:278, 210. See Calvin, Institutes, 1:93−94.

  134. 134.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:210, 208, 219.

  135. 135.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:206, 213. Edwards referred to Numbers 24:17, joining a long tradition of interpreters who believed the “daystar” signified Christ.

  136. 136.

    “Notes on Scripture,” WJE, 15:70−71. This entry distinguishing the influences of the Spirit into “common” and “gracious” was written in 1729 and thus anticipates his more extensive thinking on the matter during the 1740s, as seen in his “Treatise on Grace” and Religious Affections. Winiarski wrongly asserts that Edwards introduced this dichotomy in “Treatise on Grace,” and he consequently overstates his argument that Edwards’ doctrine of the Spirit shifted during the revival period of the early 1740s by making the Spirit’s immediate gracious activity more central to his “emerging revival theology.” See Winiarski, Darkness Falls, 217−18. For the dating of Edwards’ entries in “Notes on Scripture,” see Stein’s “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE, 15:42−46.

  137. 137.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:278, 280. Emphasis added. Brown, for instance, argues that in Religious Affections, Edwards had moved beyond his earlier position that the spiritual sense concerned merely an aesthetic and experiential dimension and now ascribed to it greater powers to reveal scriptural content to the enlightened reader. Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 52. My reading challenges this interpretation.

  138. 138.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:280–81. Owen, Reason of Faith, 57–58.

  139. 139.

    Profitable Hearers, WJE, 14:249.

  140. 140.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:281, 283. Emphasis original.

  141. 141.

    Religious Affections, WJE, 2:208, 210.

  142. 142.

    Marsden, Edwards, 69.

  143. 143.

    Osborn, True Christianity (1755), in Collected Writings, 115.

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Hoselton, R.P. (2023). “Complex Spiritual Ideas”: Edwards, the Spiritual Sense, and Scripture. In: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44935-2_5

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