Theologian · Early modern
Jonathan Edwards
1703–1758 · New England Calvinism; Reformed idealism
A Congregationalist minister who regarded the papacy as Antichrist and expected its fall, yet whose doctrine of grace as an infused disposition and of salvation as participation in God's beauty stands nearer to Catholic teaching than most Reformed theology.
Pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, leader of the Great Awakening, missionary to the Mohicans at Stockbridge and briefly president of Princeton, Edwards was the most powerful philosophical mind of colonial America. A Treatise concerning Religious Affections (1746) distinguished true conversion, a new ‘sense of the heart’ for divine beauty, from mere enthusiasm. Freedom of the Will (1754) argued that the will always follows the strongest motive, so that moral necessity is compatible with responsibility and Arminian self-determination is incoherent; The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758) argued for inherited guilt. His Two Dissertations (1765) taught that God created the world to communicate His own glory and that true virtue is benevolence to Being in general, of which merely natural virtue is a shadow; privately he held an idealism on which the world exists only as God's continuous communication.
Why he matters: He is the greatest theologian the United States has produced and the Reformed tradition's most consistent statement of divine sovereignty; Catholics who read him meet an aesthetics of grace with real affinities to Augustine and to Balthasar, and a doctrine of the ‘divine and supernatural light’ that studies such as Anri Morimoto's have compared with Trent's infused grace.
Where to be careful
His determinism contradicts Trent's canon that free will is not ‘a name without reality’ (Session 6, canon 5) and the Synod of Quierzy; his total depravity, his massa damnata and his forensic justification sit against Trent (Sessions 5 and 6); his idealism and continuous creation strain the real causality of creatures through which Providence works (CCC 306-308). Common ground: the primacy of grace, salvation as participation in the divine nature, and the beauty of holiness.
Reading
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Religious AffectionsJonathan Edwards · The twelve signs of true grace; compare St. Francis de Sales on love.
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Freedom of the WillJonathan Edwards · The determinist argument that both the Thomist and the Molinist schools must answer.
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Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of SalvationAnri Morimoto · Argues that Edwards's infused disposition of grace stands nearer Trent than Luther.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each question the test asks.