Jonathan Edwards Studies is at a Dead End

This is not an article on Jonathan Edwards’ culpability as a slaveholder. Nor is this article about all of Edwards scholarship—studies on Edwards’ exegesis and pastoral ministry are, by and large, still going strong. However, a series of factors over the last few years have conspired to severely decrease the interest in reading and writing about Edwards. From our personal experience and conversations as Edwards scholars in European, British, and American university settings, we would carve up these factors in, broadly, the following manner:

We will discuss each of these factors below, but we want to focus on Edwards’ “exotic metaphysics” and how Edwards’ philosophy is received because his philosophical commitments lie beneath all of his exegetical observations and pastoral judgments. In this article we lay out analytic philosophy’s interpretation of Edwards over the last twenty-odd years and why it has led readers today into a dead end.¹

First, a word about how this article is laid out. The body of this article is intended to communicate clearly and concisely the problems in Edwards studies, relative to his philosophy, at a lay-level. The footnotes, which are quite extensive, offer more technical details about the state of Edwards’ “exotic” metaphysics that will be of interest to scholars who would like to give Edwards a second hearing.

Edwards’ Exotic Metaphysics

If you have not been keeping up with the general literary output in Edwards studies let’s get you up to speed.² Contemporary Edwardsean theologians and historians think Edwards is wrong on, at least, the following topics:

the nature of cause and effect
how God created and providentially governs the world
how to distinguish the Creator from the creature.

The common denominator for all three of these Edwardsean errors is his “hypertrophied” account of divine action.³

Regarding (1), Edwards is an occasionalist. This claim means no creature exercises any causal power but is merely the occasion wherein God alone acts. You might have thought that you clicked on this URL, but you didn’t; God did through you. Commitment (2)—his “continuous creationism”—escalates commitment (1) by holding that God must create the universe anew each moment, ex nihilo after ex nihilo after ex nihilo. The image often used to describe this divine activity is that of film stills on a rotating motion picture screen.⁴ Frame by frame, the film gives the impression of action, but in reality, each still or frame is inert and unmoving, recreated by God each moment at a time.⁵ When (1) and (2) are combined, God becomes the only causal author, which in turn means that he is inescapably the author of all sins.

If this seems too bizarre to be true, then you will want to stay away from the last twenty years of literature on Edwards’ philosophy.⁶ Given the transitory, apparition-like nature of creatures on (1) and (2), commitment (3) should come as no surprise. This refers to Edwards’ panentheism. A panentheist—as defined by the literature—is a thinker who holds to a weak ontological distinction between the Creator and the creature. This means that the world exists “within” God or, in metaphorical language, God is a kind of “soul of the universe.”⁷ Historically speaking, this is also similar to panpsychism, which was a line of thinking common in Platonic circles.⁸

Retrieving an “Exotic,” “Unhinged” Edwards?

The good news for Edwards is that “retrieval” projects are all the rage, especially among evangelicals.⁹ The bad news for Edwards scholars is that no one wants to retrieve an occasionalist, a continuous creationist, and panentheist theology. Seriously, which theologians and pastors look at these fundamental commitments on cause and effect, God and creation, as correct? Who wants to endorse these models of God? No one.¹⁰ All the philosophers studying Edwards on these subjects think he is wrong.

That so many Edwards scholars think he is wrong about these things is an understatement. More accurately, Edwards is regarded as “exotic” and “unhinged” on these matters. Here are fourteen individual statements—derived from both contemporary and historic readings of Edwards, academic and popular alike—that demonstrate just how bizarre Edwards is understood to be:

Over the centuries, many [scholars] have advanced philosophical reasons for rejecting Edwards’ occasionalism…. Perhaps Edwards should be faulted less for making God the author of evil than for speculating on deep and perhaps unanswerable questions.¹¹

Maybe Edwards’ drift towards occasionalism and an anti-realist ontology that ultimately makes the world a kind of “magic lantern show,” a projection of divine ideas from God, can also be understood as a reaction to the perceived danger of a [rising] secularism.¹²

This [continuous creation] belief is susceptible to the charge of ultra-supernaturalism on Edwards’ part, and it constitutes, in the sheer counter-intuitiveness that attaches to it, a species of metaphysical enthusiasm…. It would not be improper to claim… that continuous creation falls, under the category of what Locke aptly describes as “the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain.”¹³

I say, [continuous creation] … is as wild a conceit of a vain imagination as was ever published to the world. It cannot be paralleled with anything, unless the doctrine of transubstantiation.¹⁴

[Edwards] can easily swallow the gnat of [divine] sovereignty because he has already devoured the camel of pure idealism. Surely Edwards needed to be an idealist to assure himself that his theory of sovereignty was more than a pious fiction or feeling.¹⁵

[For Edwards], we exist as divine ideas that are projected on the movie theater screen of the divine mind in a series ordered according to God’s will. This is brought out most clearly in… “The Mind” notebook as well as The End of Creation, where his monomania about preserving the absolute sovereignty of God from any encroachment by creatures means that he ends up undermining created agency… The cost of preserving God’s sovereignty in Edwards’ case is implicating the Deity as the author of sin and evil, a cost that most Christian theists will find too high.¹⁶

[Edwards] was color blind to everything but the sin of man and the “sovereignty” of God… how can we explain this? We find our explanation then in the fact that Jonathan Edwards was a theological monomaniac. He was afflicted with a species of delusional insanity, which took possession of him in his early youth, and which had its centre in the dogma of “Divine sovereignty.” When his mind turned to that subject, his faculties were preternaturally active, but this activity was a as morbid as that of many a disordered mind.¹⁷

One of the greatest of all errors is the attempt to exalt God by making him the sole cause, the sole agent in the universe, by denying to the creature freedom of will and moral power, by making man a mere recipient and transmitter of a foreign impulse. This… destroys all moral connection between God and his creatures… To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life. It destroys responsibility. It puts out the light of the universe; it makes the universe a machine. It freezes the fountain of our moral feelings, of all generous affection and lofty aspirations. Pantheism, if it leaves man a free agent, is a comparatively harmless speculation… The denial of moral freedom, could it really be believed, would prove the most fatal of errors. If Edwards’ work on the will could really answer its end—if it could thoroughly persuade men that they were bound by an irresistible necessity, that their actions were fixed links in the chain of destiny, that there was but one agent, God, in the universe—it would be one of the most pernicious books ever issued from our press. Happily, it is a demonstration that no man believes, which the whole consciousness contradicts.¹⁸

Edwards was… a “God intoxicated theist.” He was so committed to the absolute sovereignty of God over all that God has created that he went to great lengths to preserve that sovereignty in the face of what he would have thought of as potential avenues by means of which God’s exalted status might be eroded or undermined by his creatures. But the cost of Edwards’ vision of God is that human agency appears to be a very meagre thing indeed, and God appears to be morally responsible for sin. For although he speaks of human moral responsibility in Freedom of the Will, from his other works it is clear that no creature persists from one moment to the next in order to perform any of the actions he imputes to them. Created persons are just conglomerations of instantaneous stages aggregated across time. It is very difficult to see how one can salvage a robust account of creaturely moral responsibility from a view like that. For it means that no creature exists long enough to be able to complete an action for which the creature may be held morally responsible.¹⁹

This doctrine of a continued creation destroys the Scriptural and common sense distinction between creation and preservation… The two ideas are essentially distinct. Any theory, therefore, which confounds them must be fallacious. God wills that the things which He has created shall continue to be; and to deny that He can cause continuous existence is to deny his omnipotence.²⁰

[Edwards’] doctrine of continuous creation is a dumpster fire… If you want to be a faithful Edwardsean, you will have to reject him on several key things, including this continuous creation [doctrine].²¹

Here’s a task for scholars: find the first glimmer in Edwards’ theology of continual creationism, and read the notebook where it arises, and let’s find out what he ate that day and maybe the night before. Maybe bad indigestion was creating delusions in Edwards.²²

In the final analysis, God is alone in Edwards’ metaphysics “talking to a reflection of himself in a mirror” as [Thomas] Schafer puts it.²³

As [Edwards] argued in Original Sin and throughout his Miscellanies, God continually recreates the world every second, and God himself is the reality sustaining all of creation. Nothing exists apart from God’s continual recreation of it, and the substance of every existent thing is God’s knowing and willing of that thing. God is the substance even of heaven and of hell.²⁴

With Edwards specialists like these, who needs enemies?

Notice that we snuck in a few of Edwards’ sworn enemies—Charles Chauncy and William Ellery Channing—into the above quotations. The point of this exercise is to show that we are at a topsy-turvy moment in Edwards studies where Edwards opponents and Edwards specialists actually agree that America’s purportedly greatest theologian is altogether “unhinged” on basic matters of philosophy.

Thesis

Building upon the central claim of this article—Edwards studies is at a dead end—we offer up the following state-of-the-field update to lay readers and, what is more, a call to arms. To that end, the remainder of this article is broken up into three sections. In the first section, we discuss why awareness of Edwards’ exotic metaphysics has not trickled down into more lay or popular readings. Call this the “Edwards of Faith” section, influenced by pastors like John Piper and Tim Keller.²⁵ In the second section, we quickly survey the last two decades of Edwards scholarship by analytic philosophers and analytic theologians. This is the “Edwards of (Analytic) Philosophy” section.²⁶ We strongly disagree with this interpretation.

Of course, we cannot trace all of the above stated problems in Edwards scholarship. Instead, we purposefully limit our conceptual center of gravity, so to speak, to the occasionalism and continuous creation features of Crisp’s account of Edwards.²⁷ In a third section, we show how a recent attempt to fuse the popular, “Edwards of Faith” with the “Edwards of Philosophy” went haywire in John Carrick’s Jonathan Edwards and the Immediacy of God (2020). We chose this book because it concisely, honestly, and transparently exhibits the problematic trends in the current analytic interpretation of Edwards. Carrick also shows us that the current analytic interpretations force us to choose between Edwards being wildly ignorant or a liar. Finally, in our concluding section, we give reasons to be hopeful with a return to the “Edwards of History,” represented by scholars like William Morris and Norman Fiering, Kenneth Minkema, Peter Thuesen, and Douglas Sweeney.

At this point, you are likely thinking: “But if this article is a literature review, why not publish it in an academic journal?” The short answer is that we want a wider, non-academic audience to be aware of this call to arms. For, this is not the first time warning bells have been rung. That honor belongs to Crisp’s 2014 article: “On the Orthodoxy of Jonathan Edwards.”²⁸ Crisp might have more accurately entitled this piece “On the Heterodoxy of Jonathan Edwards.” Maybe then scholars might have heard the bell toll. Alas, that call was ignored, despite Crisp’s argument being characteristically clear and simple: Edwards’ writings about God and creation have profound contradictions in them. More specifically, Crisp’s argument was that Edwards claims to subscribe to divine simplicity, but his additional commitments to occasionalism, continuous creationism, and panentheism force him into an insuperable dilemma. Either God is not metaphysically simple, or the latter commitments force him towards pantheism.²⁹ To date, not a single scholar has picked up Crisp’s gauntlet, either by challenging Crisp’s account of Edwards or by modifying and defending Edwards himself.³⁰ By this light, this article is a less technical version of Crisp’s call to arms (at least in the body of the text)—one we hope is not ignored. Enter the “Edwards of Faith.”

I. The Edwards of Faith

The “Edwards of Faith” is likely to be well known among followers of the London Lyceum. Edwards is the relentless preacher of evangelical truths, the defender of the Great Awakening, the towering intellect whose sermons and scriptural notes line the bookshelves of Millennial pastors who were endeared to Edwards because of the ministries of John Piper or Tim Keller.³¹ This is also the “Banner of Truth Edwards,” so to speak. That is, the college kids and pastors who, reluctant to purchase the expensive Yale volumes, trudged through the painfully small double-column print to understand Piper and Keller’s inspiration.³² We have both heard Edwards scholars scoff at these readers after a beer or two. But such academics shouldn’t kid themselves, for these are the readers that keep Religious Affections and Freedom of the Will on the Amazon bestseller list in theology to this day.

It is no stretch to say there is no “Edwards of History” or “Edwards of Philosophy” without the “Edwards of Faith” readership. How many secular undergraduates come into universities today with an intrinsic interest in pre-Revolutionary American religious thought? Whatever that number is, it will never be the size of the pipeline of readers coming from people who read The Gospel Coalition. Edwards scholars need a steady stream of the latter to sustain teaching and publishing interest in Edwards at the scale it has been running since 2003.

2003: The Rising Tide

At the tercentenary of Edwards’ birth (2003), historian Doug Sweeney heralded it as the “most important year ever in the history of Edwards studies.” Many of the evangelicals—hooked on Edwards or American (religious) history through Piper and Keller—were handed off to academic mentors like George Marsden and Mark Noll.³³ Marsden’s award-winning biography of Edwards was published during that same year. Noll’s magisterial survey of American historical theology—America’s God—was published the fall before that.³⁴ At the time, there were clear on-ramps from the “Edwards of Faith” into academia.

This 2003 tide seems to have been broken into two tributaries.³⁵ The first tended towards the Edwards of analytic philosophy, which we discuss in the next section. The second tended towards Edwards’ exegesis and pastoral practices, a more natural environment for evangelicals which has continued to flourish.³⁶ There is also a great deal of work being done on the “Visual Edwards” and translations of Edwards into international languages that will certainly keep the “Edwards of Faith” interest afloat.³⁷ The leading scholar on Edwards’ exegesis, Doug Sweeney, made the point that Edwards perused his exegetical sources (e.g., Cotton Mather, Matthew Henry, John Owen) “more frequently than Locke, Berkeley, Newton, Malebranche” and others who have typically drawn the most attention in Edwards studies.³⁸

In terms of counting citations and sources, Sweeney is absolutely correct. However, the reason why—by our lights—philosophers like Berkeley and Malebranche matter disproportionately for Edwards studies is because it is (purportedly) from these sources that Edwards grabs ahold of his exotic, unhinged theories of occasionalism and continuous creationism. While Edwards’ exegetical insights might be edifying to us today, how many of them touch upon causation—divine or human? And should exegetical scholars continue to ignore Edwards on causation?

2020: The Tide Goes Out

Anecdotally speaking, since 2003, the high tide of Edwards scholarship seems to be receding. We can offer at least three pieces of evidence for this.

First, consider the Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (2021), which is a compendium of the best scholarship on Edwards’ sources, context, philosophy, theology, spirituality, missions, and legacy. For a scholar to contribute here is a kind of crowning moment for their Edwards career. Of the thirty-nine contributors, nine have completed their work on Edwards and moved onto other projects. Ten more are either emeritus or approaching retirement. One has since passed away. Only seven contributors are established senior scholars—that this, they enjoy an economically secure post in an academic institution and are continuing to work on Edwards or American evangelicalism more broadly. Astonishingly, the other seven contributors—among the youngest of the contributors to the Handbook—are either independent scholars or effectively outside of the academy.³⁹ While this might be the norm in the higher education downturn, it is certainly not an ideal arrangement for the next generation of Edwards scholarship. Crisp notably refrained from contributing to the Handbook altogether and appears to be done writing on Edwards.⁴⁰

The second reason for thinking the tide of Edwards scholarship is receding has to do with Edwards’ slaveholding. In our experience, this seems to be the most significant factor in diverting evangelical interest away from Edwards at major American universities like Yale, Notre Dame, and Princeton. Since 2020, evangelical readers and students have been scandalized as they learned that Edwards was a lifelong slaveholder. Much to their credit, their disappointment is usually sincere and earnest. How could America’s greatest theologian—someone who shares their faith—reduce another human being into mere property?⁴¹ Secular students, by contrast, tend to shrug their shoulders in cynicism, making it all the more difficult to motivate serious discussion around Edwards and the Puritans in the classroom.

The third reason why Edwards scholarship is drying up—the reason we are focusing on here—is that readers of the “Edwards of Faith” simply don’t know what to do with Edwards’ basic philosophical commitments. The exemplar we will use for this instance is Carrick’s work below.

To summarize, the “Edwards of Faith” generates an evangelical pipeline of scholars who tend to be most interested in Edwards’ exegesis and pastoral practice. Due to justified objections against Edwards’ unrepentant slaveholding, this first pipeline appears to be drying up at the universities that were once major producers of Edwards scholars. Yet another, smaller portion of the 2003 tide opted for the second tributary: the “Edwards of Philosophy.” Let’s look at what happened to their ideas.

II. The Edwards of (Analytic) Philosophy

To dominate an academic field, a necessary condition is to be in the right place at the right time. As analytic theologians, Paul Helm and Oliver Crisp were perfectly positioned to lead research on Edwards’ philosophy in the early 2000s and 2010s. At the height of the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement, if you were an evangelical intimidated (or out-priced) by Edwards’ Freedom of the Will or Original Sin, you picked up something—often uncritically—by Helm and Crisp.⁴² It would be too strong to say that Helm and Crisp’s interpretation ran unopposed during this period. There were dissenters, albeit no more than three.⁴³ In theory, there was a sufficient supply of “Jonathan Edwards is my homeboy” readership—academic and laity alike—that some sector of this population should have been concerned about Crisp’s heterodox Edwards in 2014. Alas, this never materialized. To fully explain why it never materialized would require going back to the start of analytic readings of Edwards (c. 1971), but space forbids doing that. Instead, we will provide a thumbnail sketch of the “Edwards of (Analytic) Philosophy” since 2003.

2003—2005: Laying the Foundation

Crisp’s interpretation has, by and large, set the standard for interpreting Edwards’ metaphysics since he edited Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian (2003) with his then doctoral supervisor, Paul Helm. Crisp’s inaugural publication, “How Occasional was Edwards’ Occasionalism?” was an interpretation (contra Sang Lee) that Edwards was a defender of occasionalism. Helm’s contribution to this collection covered Edwards and Locke’s theories of personal identity, something he continued writing about for the next several years. In that article, Helm articulates the most radical version of continuous creationism, writing that “[d]espite Edwards’ very strong avowal of divine sovereignty it would seem that not even God can preserve in existence for more than a moment a being as numerically identical being or as one that has numerically identical parts through that period of time.”⁴⁴ Thankfully, this divine ineptitude version of continuous creation was not picked up by Crisp and carried down the analytic river.

Crisp then went on to publish his doctoral dissertation, Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin (2005), which hitherto contains his most technical and detailed reading of Edwards. Chapter seven of this volume, “The Problem with Occasionalism,” is arguably the most important feature in that work. Crisp concludes that Edwards’ occasionalism was “the fatal flaw” in his metaphysics because it holds that “God is the sole moral agent… no creature is morally responsible for their actions.”⁴⁵ Thus, “it appears that Edwards’ God is the author of sin.”⁴⁶ Crisp cites Helm throughout his book in support of this reading and there appears to be nothing in Helm’s writings (to date) that seriously dissents from Crisp’s occasionalism and continuous creationism interpretation.

One of the first non-analytic scholars to take notice of the implications for Crisp’s new Edwards was Elizabeth Agnew Cochran. In a 2005 book review, she rightly read Crisp as suggesting that to be Edwardsean after Edwards, one must remove his occasionalism, which is unfortunately “central to his metaphysics.”⁴⁷ Then, as nearly the entire field is inclined to do, Cochran went on to write a book—Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’ Ethics (2011)—that simply whistled by Edwards’ otherwise unhinged accounts of cause and effect, divine and human action.⁴⁸ This “whistling by” is a reoccurring strategy with the “Edwards of Philosophy.” Theologians and historians don’t really know what to do with Edwards’ occasionalism, so they simply pretend it isn’t the leading interpretation for how Edwards’ thinks about the world. Crisp later interacted with Cochran in his “Moral Character, Reformed Theology, and Jonathan Edwards” (2017), which reminded ethicists that the problems of occasionalism and continuous creation were still problems and added the problem of theological voluntarism as an update.⁴⁹ Shockingly, ethicists haven’t exactly been clamoring to use this Edwards in projects of retrieval or moral theology.

2012—2016: Growing Concerns

Crisp’s stark conclusions—occasionalism as fatal flaw and God as the author of sin—are somewhat muted in his Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (2012). And yet another new problem emerges: Panentheism. The panentheism debate initially emerged as a question over whether Edwards subscribed to a classical doctrine of simplicity, but in his chapter on the subject, Crisp assembles Edwards’ panentheism, emanationism, idealism, continuous creationism, and occasionalism together. The combination of these “exotic” ideas prompts the question: “Is Edwards a classical theist?⁵⁰ Of course, this is not an easy question to answer. Hence Crisp’s 2014 article, “On the Orthodoxy of Jonathan Edwards,” wherein occasionalism, continuous creation, and panentheism don’t just threaten creaturely causality, they threaten to deny that God is metaphysically simple. Still worse is that Edwards is a short slide away from becoming a pantheist—identifying God with the created world! In his last entries on Edwards for the Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (2017), Crisp has not changed his views. If anything, Edwards’ exotic commitments seem worse today than a decade ago.⁵¹

Off stage, between 2006 and (roughly) 2020, Crisp trained several doctoral students with various levels of investment in Edwards scholarship. Most of them had a passing interest in Edwards.⁵² Few showed concern or interest in the negative entailments of Edwards’ occasionalism, continuous creationism, or panentheism. Only two students—Myself (Mark Hamilton) and Chris Woznicki—have consistently plied the Edwardsean trade. Hamilton has recently attempted to modify Edwards’ “flip book” picture of the world.⁵³ Woznicki, by contrast, agrees with Crisp’s interpretation and has focused on defending it from Hamilton.⁵⁴ Overall, however, there has been little dissent from within the camp.

2018—present: A Settled Consensus

In what might not be unjustly characterized as a passing of the torch, in 2018, Crisp co-authored Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought with Kyle Strobel. As an introductory text, it will doubtless ensconce Crisp’s reading of Edwards’ occasionalism, continuous creation, and panentheism to another generation of students.⁵⁵ This moment is important because it means the “Edwards of Philosophy” is transitioning outside analytic circles into settled theological readings. Occasionalism, continuous creationism, and panentheism are becoming the abnormal normal, so to speak, in reading Edwards. Strobel might object to this characterization, especially because his final chapter, “Becoming Edwardsean,” is an attempt to fix the seemingly “downright unhinged” parts of Edwards by simply amputating them.⁵⁶ In recommending this move, he is repeating what Crisp and Cochran observed back in 2005.

III. The “Edwards of Faith” fused with the “Edwards of Philosophy”

What happens when the “Edwards of Philosophy” is let loose within the “Edwards of Faith” readership? This section explores the implications for such experimental fusion.

Carrick’s Conundrum

On the interpretation handed down by Helm, Crisp, and now Strobel, Edwards’ Freedom of the Will and Original Sin are incoherent.⁵⁷ Worse, the entailments of their interpretation force readers to choose between Edwards being a liar or his being wildly ignorant. We will come to this dilemma after we unpack the purported incoherence between Edwards’ two treatises.

If occasionalism is true and God is the one true cause, then questions arise over secondary (or creaturely) causation. Do we have any causal heft? The answer from Crisp and Strobel is unclear. Sometimes they offer a weaker claim: Edwards’ accidentally or unintentionally “undermines creaturely causation.”⁵⁸ Other times they offer a much stronger claim: Edwards cannot (i.e., is not logically entitled to) talk about secondary causation.⁵⁹ The strongest claim is that “Edwards thinks he can, in fact, talk about a kind of secondary causality, despite the fact that there is no actual creaturely causality.”⁶⁰ This quote reads as if Edwards is asserting A and ~A. All of this is quite confusing. We think what Crisp and Strobel mean to say is that Edwards affirms that there are secondary entities (i.e., creatures) who lack the power of efficient causation because they are stuck in the “flip book” of continuous creation.⁶¹ Secondary entities do not, metaphysically speaking, have causal powers—only God does. When Edwards speaks of “his going to Boston” or of “Hopkins coming to visit Stockbridge” or “deviant teenagers passing around a midwifery book,” these are all “vulgar” ways of speaking about secondary entities that appear to have causal powers and interaction in the world, despite these appearances being metaphysically false. Therefore, Edwards logically cannot appeal to secondary causes in his system.⁶²

This occasionalist/continuous creationist reading immediately prompts the question: what on earth is Edwards doing for three hundred and five pages talking about motives, volitions, moral ability, human agency, liberty of indifference, obligations, commands, praise, blame, virtue, vice, acts, habits, and denying that God is the author of sin in Freedom of the Will?⁶³ Crisp says it “is very difficult to see how one can salvage a robust account of creaturely moral responsibility from [continuous creationism],” which, given the lengthy nature of Freedom of the Will, is quite the understatement!⁶⁴ Readers need some explanation for why Edwards toiled on about creaturely causation for almost a decade.⁶⁵ Crisp claims that Edwards “says far less about the nature of causation” when compared to his discussion of occasionalism and continuous creationism in Original Sin IV.3. He cites the infamous two-page definition of “cause” in Freedom of the Will as if it is the only place where Edwards discusses causation.⁶⁶ Yes, the word “occasion” appears in Edwards’ definition of “cause” here—but this is one word in a 530-word definition that includes other loaded metaphysical words like “ground,” “reason,” “moral,” “natural,” “positive,” “negative,” etc.⁶⁷ Furthermore, merely citing Edwards’ statement—“I sometimes use the word ‘effect’ for the consequence of another thing, which is perhaps rather an occasion than a cause, most properly speaking”—does not explain how readers should reconcile the occasionalism of Original Sin with the rest of Freedom of the Will.⁶⁸ If anything, this meager “perhaps” connection to the notorious closing ten pages of Original Sin calls out for more explanation, not elision.⁶⁹

Let us name the apparent incoherence between the occasionalism of Original Sin and the human agency of Freedom of the Will “Carrick’s Conundrum.”⁷⁰ The name comes from Carrick’s Jonathan Edwards and the Immediacy of God (2020). As a fusion of the “Edwards of Faith” and the “Edwards of Philosophy,” it brings the tensions to light in a way that is absent in recent treatments of Edwards. We read Carrick’s book as a kind of logical conclusion—the dead end—of the Helm-Crisp-Strobel interpretation of Edwards.⁷¹ (This section is not a review of Carrick’s book—for many reasons.⁷²)

Carrick’s thesis is that the immediacy of God is the key theme that runs through all of Edwards’ disparate writings.⁷³ Think of “divine immediacy” as a kind of public affairs re-branding; an attempt to make occasionalism, continuous creationism, and panentheism more palatable. Carrick is an author deeply sympathetic to the “Edwards of Faith,” having previously published a book commending Edwards’ preaching for Banner of Truth.⁷⁴ But in this book, Carrick struggles to reconcile the Northampton Sage he admires with the “Edwards of Philosophy” he has inherited from the writings of Helm, Crisp, and Strobel. In fact, Edwards and the Immediacy of God follows Crisp and Helm so closely that Carrick reproduces large sections of their arguments into full-page block quotes.⁷⁵

To his credit, Carrick recognizes the conundrum that Helm, Crisp, and Strobel have mostly passed by:

Another strand in the potential resolution of [the absence the continuous creationism of Original Sin in Freedom of the Will] is the possibility that, at this point in these two works, Edwards is dealing with matters at two different levels. It is quite possible that Edwards is making an implicit distinction here between… speaking in “a strict and philosophical sense” and speaking “in a loose and popular sense.” … According to this view, Edwards can be construed as “thinking with the learned” and speaking in “a strict and philosophical sense” in his continuous creation-cum-occasionalism doctrine in Original Sin, and he can be construed as “speaking with the vulgar” and speaking in “a loose and popular sense” in his determinism in Freedom of the Will—in the former treatise he is utilizing the language of the philosopher and in the latter the language of the shop.⁷⁶

What, exactly, does loose/strict sense distinction mean? Carrick continues, claiming that,

according to this hypothesis, the seemingly irreconcilable problem is, in fact, fairly easily solved: the occasionalism of Original Sin emerges in the course of his metaphysical treatment of issues, while the determinism of Freedom of the Will emerges in the course of his non-theoretical treatment of issues.⁷⁷

Carrick seems to be building on Crisp and Helm’s scattered remarks on the possibility that Edwards borrowed George Berkeley’s vulgar/strict sense distinction.⁷⁸ His metaphor is that Freedom of the Will is “shop-talk” while Original Sin is “metaphysics-talk.” How exactly this solves Carrick’s conundrum is unclear. Are the “learned” just able to handle the controversial truth that they have no agency, while the plebians cannot? It seems to name the problem rather than solve it.

Carrick sometimes puts the conundrum a bit too complex. The contradiction is quite simple:

In Freedom of the Will, it appears that creatures have some kind of agency.
In Original Sin, it appears creatures have no agency.

This is Carrick’s Conundrum. What can be said in response?

There are so many problems with Carrick’s attempted solution that one can understand why perhaps Helm, Crisp, and Strobel avoided opening this pandora’s box. Let’s start with the four most pressing problems with Carrick’s solution:

Edwards says the exact opposite of Carrick’s metaphysics-talk/shop-talk division in several notes to himself on “PROPOSALS” for Original Sin. This book is meant for clergy and the laity who are being misled by dissenting pastor John Taylor, whereas Nature of True Virtue and “The Mind” are intended for a “learned” audience, taking on university professors and academics.⁷⁹
Freedom of the Will is replete with metaphysical discussion, so much so that Edwards dedicates his final section (IV.13) to defending the importance of metaphysics.⁸⁰ So Carrick’s solution does not accurately describe this work either.
Even if the above passages from 1. and 2. did not exist, Carrick’s solution (or metaphor) doesn’t solve the fundamental conundrum served up by Helm, Crisp, and Strobel: how do Freedom of the Will and Original Sin fit together? If one is “shop-talk” and the other is “philosophy-talk,” are we not then headed towards duplex veritas? A double truth theory, where something can be true in philosophy but false in theology?⁸¹ For example, can I say, “Vulgarly speaking, I have seven brothers, but strictly speaking, I have only one sister?” If not, then why is Edwards permitted to say, “Vulgarly, I act, but strictly speaking, only God acts.” This looks less like a vulgar/strict distinction and more like a vulgar/strict contradiction. Or, if not a contradiction, then a deception. What motive would Edwards have for telling his readers they have agency, when in reality they have none? This starts to look like the weaponization of theology for the purposes of social control.⁸²
Carrick’s solution also doesn’t stick because he abandons it a few pages later in the face of other primary sources. His discussion of Edwards’ 1734 sermon, A Divine and Supernatural Light, preached to his Northampton congregation seems to contain several occasionalist concepts and themes. This was obviously a public, “shop-talk” event, and not a philosophy seminar.⁸³ The same is true for Original Sin twenty-years later, which was not published anonymously or written in Latin or released in coded messages. Both of these publications make no sense as esoteric documents. This is simply not how early modern esotericism works.⁸⁴

Thus, even Carrick is not satisfied with his solution to his Conundrum.

Edwards: Wildly Ignorant or Esoteric Liar?

After running out of answers, Carrick continues thinking aloud in such a way as to make it look like Edwards is indeed esoteric and sneaky with his metaphysical doctrines:

This line of interpretation [i.e., philosophy-talk/shop-talk] would also explain why Edwards’ continuous creation-plus-occasionalism doctrine is conspicuous by its absence in his sermons, whether in Northampton or in Stockbridge. Indeed, it is, surely, antecedently almost inconceivable that Edwards would have emphasized to the farmers and tradesmen of Northampton, still less to the Indians of Stockbridge, that the preacher who left the pulpit before their very eyes was not numerically the same as the preacher who entered the pulpit, or that they, his hearers, were not numerically identical with those who had taken their places in church approximately two hours earlier! Shrewdly, Edwards manifests in his pulpit utterances a certain reserve with regard to the more esoteric aspects of his concept of divine immediacy. He prefers, instead, to convey a sense of that immediacy via (for instance) the vivid, graphic image of the spider held over the fire—the sinner is, at all times and in all places, in the hands of God.⁸⁵ In his sermons, Edwards was, not surprisingly, “speaking with the vulgar”— he was speaking in “a loose and popular sense.” What is so interesting is that the immediacy of God implicit in the spider image is an expression, at a popular level, of Edwards’ theoretical position. It is the sheer versatility of method with which Edwards conveys this enormous preoccupation with divine immediacy that is so striking.⁸⁶

A shrewd, esoteric Edwards! The closest Crisp and Strobel come to approaching Carrick’s Conundrum is in their concluding chapter:

One could be forgiven for getting the sense that we have introduced two different figures called Jonathan Edwards to you, or, if nothing else, two versions of Edwards’ persona: a Jekyll and a Hyde (deciding which is which would depend on one’s own interests and assumptions). For most of our readers, we assume, Edwards “the theologian” rings a bit more true than Edwards “the philosopher.” Whereas occasionalism, continuous creation, idealism, and panentheism were slightly less radical in Edwards’ day, at least in certain circles, they seem downright unhinged to many of us.⁸⁷

Rather than reconciling or harmonizing Edwards’ Jekyll-theology with his Hyde-philosophy, Strobel repeatedly recommends just detaching, amputating, or “going beyond” the Hyde-philosophy.⁸⁸

To summarize thus far, to solve the tensions inherent in the “Edwards of Philosophy,” Carrick is recommending something like doublespeak and Crisp and Strobel are recommending detaching the occasionalism, continuous creationism, and panentheism commitments from Edwards’ overall system. Carrick’s Conundrum—the standing contradiction between the occasionalism of Original Sin and the human agency of Freedom of the Will—still stands unscathed. But if we press further, we find the situation is far worse than this!

Is Edwards deeply dishonest—a liar—or just wildly ignorant? This is an inescapable question generated by Edwards’ well-known letter (#117) to his close confidant John Erskine—a kind of Rorschach test for Edwards’ orthodoxy. The context is that Edwards has been fired from Northampton and Erskine has asked him whether he would consider moving his ministerial career to Scotland. Edwards replies:

You are pleased, dear Sir, very kindly to ask me whether I could sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, and submit to the Presbyterian form of church government… As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty.⁸⁹

Helm and Strobel never address how this letter fits with the “Edwards of Philosophy.” Crisp cites letter #117 a couple of times, calling it “more than a little odd,” but elides the liar/ignorant dilemma by simply repeating that “Edwards was not a confessional theologian.”⁹⁰ Carrick doesn’t seem to know what to do with this remark. On the one hand, continuous creationism, occasionalism, and panentheism are clearly and obviously beyond the bounds of Westminster. Could Edwards really not see that these metaphysical commitments were incompatible—things that Helm, Crisp, Strobel, and Carrick can see so clearly now? On the other hand, would Edwards tell a brazen lie just to save his employment?

In the face of the dilemma, Carrick opts for wildly ignorant:

What is so remarkable here is… that a de facto occasionalist-panentheist should apparently feel so ready and able to endorse the Westminster Confession of Faith. The stance of the Westminster Standards on the issue of primary and secondary causation is quite clear… What is, perhaps, most startling of all, however, is the seemingly complete lack of awareness of this chasm on Edwards’ part.⁹¹

As Edwards’ attorney, Carrick must plead ignorance on behalf of his client because the only alternative is deception. Carrick continues:

These flaws do not appear to be deliberate or willful on Edwards’ part—rather, they appear to be unintentional and inadvertent. They are, it seems, the unseen ramifications and corollaries of Edwards’ stated positions and constitute, perhaps, a good example of “the law of unintended consequence.” These problems are, however, clearly not minor problems; indeed, they introduce major difficulties into certain parts of his system.⁹²

The “unintentional radicalization” defense is a story often told by Crisp and Strobel when they are looking to give a charitable gloss on Edwards’ unhinged metaphysics.⁹³ Carrick may be picking up on this theme. But still, Edwards’ “unintended consequences” are quite the radical oversight. Are we sure Edwards couldn’t imagine the problems entailed by making all of creation a divine “flip book” or “motion picture” show?

The Dead End

Here at last is where “Edwards the Philosopher” arrives at a dead end: Edwards is either an esoteric liar, or he is wildly ignorant about obvious implications of his metaphysical theology. The costs of Edwards as an esoteric deceiver are quite plain and this line will only accelerate the departure of sincere readers away from him. The costs of Edwards as wildly ignorant or “unintentionally radicalized” are not much better. Evangelicals retrieve the wisdom and virtue of the past for contemporary application. But metaphysical overreactions—a kind of Jekyll-Hyde split personality disorder—is hardly something to retrieve!

If this seems too harsh, let us offer an analogy. Imagine that we live in an age where social constructivism and gender fluidity abounds and is confusing the Church. Now, imagine that we under the zeal for classical accounts of male/female relationships and the Christ/Church metaphor, make the following move. To counter gender relativism, we argue that maleness and femaleness are actually essences that co-exist eternally alongside God. In the beginning was the Word—Father, Son, Holy Spirit, maleness and femaleness. Then in birth, God creates each male and female person through a participation in their respective maleness or femaleness forms. Gender is eternally set and anything that deviates from biological sex norms is sin. Thus, we have solved gender fluidity with gender-eternal essentialism. But at what cost?

This admittedly ridiculous example appears to solve the gender-relativism debate quite cleanly. Now fast forward to the year 2292. Should Christians retrieve this kind of reactionary, pendulum-swinging thinking? And yet, this analogy is not far from what Helm, Crisp, Strobel, and Carrick are recommending to us in the “Edwards of Philosophy.” If virtue lies at the mean between two extremes—between deism and occasionalism, then Edwards is the villain, not the intellectual hero.

IV. The Edwards of History

Perry Miller, the scholar who pulled Edwards back from the oblivion of library archives in the twentieth century, said “The real life of Jonathan Edwards was the life of his mind.”⁹⁴ However, since 2003, Edwards’ mind appears exotic and unhinged. The Helm, Crisp, and Strobel “Edwards of Philosophy” is one in which the reader is unintentionally tethered to radical occasionalism, continuous creationism, and panentheism. Despite this, all is not lost. There is hope within Edwards studies that inspires this call to arms.

First and foremost, there is good news in noting that Crisp’s Edwards is not the “Edwards of History.” Crisp has said this himself repeatedly throughout the last two decades, but it doesn’t seem to take. He opened his dissertation with the qualification: “The present study is not concerned with the historical detail of Edwards’ milieu.”⁹⁵ Later, in Edwards on God and Creation, he again disclaims:

This [book] is not a study in the history of ideas or in historical theology. It is an account of Edwards’ philosophical theology cast in the collegial mode, where we shall be concerned not only to understand what Edwards says but also to engage him on the issues he considers, with a view to ascertaining whether or not the views he expressed are coherent.⁹⁶

Crisp is entitled to write books in any mode he prefers, and he need not become an intellectual historian to be a tremendous Edwards scholar. The problem for Edwards studies—the dead end we speak of—is that readers have ignored these disclaimers and read Crisp’s writings in a way that was never intended: as historical theology.

Another citation from Crisp can supplement our case. In his “Foreword” to the republication of Norman Fiering’s Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and Its British Context (2006), Crisp writes:

Prior to reading Fiering I had thought, with Miller, Winslow, and others, that Edwards was largely a Lockean philosopher who struggled to make sense of Newtonian mechanics, but whose genius was smothered by the pressure to conform to the strictures of his Puritan theological heritage… After reading Fiering, I realized that this way of thinking about [Edwards] was hopeless.⁹⁷

The first sentence is one telling confession that we will leave undiscussed.⁹⁸ Despite all this praise for Fiering’s work, which is without question the most important book on Edwards’ intellectual context, it appears only once in Crisp’s work in a rather trivial citation.⁹⁹ The omission of intellectual historians like Fiering and William Morris from the debates within the “Edwards of Philosophy” means that there are yet more primary source depths to plumb, more metaphysics to read. We are confident that further historical context and a closer reading of his own arguments can steer Edwards’ metaphysics out of this dead end.

The “Edwards of Philosophy” is its own camp. With the notable exception of Carrick, it tends to exit outside of the “Edwards of Faith” because Helm and Crisp’s Edwards are not widely disseminated across Crossway, Banner of Truth, or Presbyterian and Reformed publications. However, Crisp and Strobel’s Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought could change this. The “Edwards of Philosophy” also lives apart from the “Edwards of History” because throughout the decades the former has steadfastly ignored other sources that could have helped render Edwards’ metaphysics and his intentions clearer, less unhinged, and less like a “dumpster fire.” If this criticism seems too harsh, remember that the purpose of retrieval in analytic theology projects is to reappropriate past ideas for contemporary analytic conversations—not for the sake of getting intellectual history right.¹⁰⁰ And this is exactly what has happened down from Helm to Crisp to his students t0 Strobel to Carrick.

Still, if our claims still seem too harsh, go investigate the footnotes of the analytic literature here in search of Edwards’ philosophical sources. Go find substantive interaction with Berkeley, Malebranche, Locke, Hutcheson, John Norris, Samuel Johnson, Ralph Cudworth, etc. Passing references don’t count. What is the ratio of seventeenth and eighteenth sources to contemporary analytic debates? And, when you do find the occasional (pun intended) Berkeley or Malebranche quote—is it coming from their Three Dialogues or The Search After Truth? Or is it simply being passed down from the Yale editors or a previous analytic philosopher? Analytic readings of Edwards should not be forbidden, of course, and Edwards scholars should welcome the clarity and rigor that analytics bring. However, we arrive at the problem—the dead end—when the “Edwards of Analytic Philosophy” is received as the “Edwards of History.” And this is the error of the last two decades of Edwards studies.

To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, “If the interpretation we followed led us to this, of what use was the interpretation?”¹⁰¹

Conclusion

Anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War, knows that as a first principle, victory—albeit argumentative victory, in this case—comes easiest when you “[a]ttack what is weak.”¹⁰² Testing the strength of anything deemed defensible for twenty-odd years—like the “Edwards of Faith” and “Edwards of Philosophy” narratives—means exploiting weaknesses and that means frustrating readers, particularly those with whom we interact throughout this article. It is unfortunate that exploiting said weaknesses in an effort to challenge (and hopefully change) such narratives will be regarded by many as a vituperative assault on fellow thinkers. Nothing could be further from our intention here. We took our cue from the late American Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia said: “I attack ideas, I don’t attack people—and some very good people have some very bad ideas.”¹⁰³ From fanboys to serious scholars, many of Edwards’ interpreters are “good people,” in the way that Scalia envisioned it. That is, most are well-meaning. But some of these same “good people” have some frustratingly bad ideas.

One final objection that could be raised against us: we have not offered a positive counter-interpretation of Edwards in this article to justify our confidence that Edwards is not inescapably exotic or unhinged. In reply, we admit our “guilt.” We have not yet proposed a comprehensive alternative way of reading Edwards. But this was not the aim of this article. The first step in solving a longstanding problem is admitting there’s a problem. That is our goal. Twenty years of misreading Edwards will not be overturned in a single online, lay-level article, but only by careful historical scholarship that takes years.¹⁰⁴

If, with the preceding state-of-the-field and subsequent call to arms, we have arrested the attention of these interpreters, we will have succeeded, in part, in writing this article. Our fullest success will be measured by what happens hereafter. Will the “Edwards of Faith” and the “Edwards of Philosophy” continue to supplant or distract from the “Edwards of History”? Will evangelical pastors begin to challenge scholarly assumptions that appear to imperil or outright invalidate Edwards’ exegetical labors? Will Edwards’ doctrine of causation, his doctrines of creation and providence, and his thoughts about creator-creature distinctions once again be scrutinized? Will scholars begin to privilege reading Edwards himself over his increasing number of interpreters? Will they follow the trails blazed by Morris and Fiering? Will Edwards scholars endeavor to re-read—or, in some cases read for the first time perhaps—Edwards’ philosophical sources: Ames, Berkeley, Cudworth, Hutcheson, Johnson, Locke, Malebranche, and Norris? Will they see the necessity of reading his rivals—Taylor, Tindal, Turnbull, Chubb, Watts, and Whitby?

How these and many more questions are answered will, in the end, determine whether the dead end can be averted.

Authors

Layne Hancock

Layne Hancock graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a PhD in moral theology in 2024. His dissertation is entitled "Saving Jonathan Edwards Ethics from Voluntarism." He also holds an MAR in philosophical theology from Yale Divinity School, a MDiv from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a BA from Baylor University. He lives in Colorado Spring, Colorado and can be contacted via Academia.edu.
View all posts

Recent Posts

Jonathan Edwards Studies is at a Dead End
S. Mark Hamilton

S. Mark Hamilton is Editor-in-Chief of The Davenant Press. He has edited several symposia and is an invited contributor to the Routledge Handbook on Idealism and Immaterialism (Routledge) the Oxford Handbook on Jonathan Edwards (OUP) and Jonathan Edwards and Reformed Dogmatics (Lexham Press, forthcoming). His periodical work can be found in such learned journals as: International Journal of Systematic Theology, Irish Theological Quarterly, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, Perichoresis, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, Open Theology, and the Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies. He recently co-edited Advent Homilies: St Augustine (Davenant Press, 2024) and Divine Omniscience and the Future: Anselmian Reflections on Open Theism by Benjamin Arbour (Cascade, 2025).
View all posts

Recent Posts

Jonathan Edwards Studies is at a Dead End

Connect With TLL

Podcast Channels

Tweets by LondonLyceum