The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia

By Harry S. Stout

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is widely acknowledged as one of the most brilliant religious thinkers and multifaceted figures in American history. A fountainhead of modern evangelicalism, Edwards wore many hats during his lifetime—theologian, philosopher, pastor and town leader, preacher, missionary, college president, family man, among others.

 With nearly four hundred entries, this encyclopedia provides a wide-ranging perspective on Edwards, offering succinct synopses of topics large and small from his life, thought, and work. Summaries of Edwards’s ideas as well as descriptions of the people and events of his times are all easy to find, and suggestions for further reading point to ways to explore topics in greater depth. 

Comprehensive and reliable, with contributions by 169 premier Edwards scholars from throughout the world, The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia will long stand as the standard reference work on this significant, extraordinary person.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467448994

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Adoption (Doctrine)

Jonathan Edwards highly regarded the doctrine of adoption and the related Christian experience of adoption. Objectively, a Christian’s adopted status supersedes justification as a blessing of the covenant of grace. Edwards often refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Adoption and describes a Christian’s experience of the Spirit’s confirmation of membership in God’s family as the spirit of adoption. This spiritual experience comforts believers and authenticates Christian experience. Edwards’s understanding of adoption influenced his controversial effort to revise church membership qualifications and admission to the Lord’s Table at Northampton.

Edwards states succinctly that adoption by God is an objective benefit of the covenant of grace grounded in the covenant of redemption in Miscellanies no. 38: Justice demands adoption and glorification, and importunes as much for it, as ever it did before for misery; in every respect that it is against the wicked, it is as much for the godly. Yea, it is abundantly more so than it would have been for Adam: for him it would be only because He graciously promised; but it is obliged to believers on the account of the absolute merit of the Son of God, and upon the account of an eternal agreement between God and his Son (WJE 13:221).

Adoption brings Christians into a more privileged relationship with God than was originally available to sinless creatures. Edwards expands this observation in Miscellanies no. 1093, and elevates the privilege of adoption above justification. Adoption is among the benefits that are the reward of the righteousness that appertains to the believer, even the righteousness of Christ, which is reckoned to him in his justification. Justification is a sentence passed by God as judge of the law resulting in condemnation or eternal life without requiring adoption. Elect angels are not, and sinless Adam would not have been, adopted into God’s family by virtue of sustained righteousness. Adoption is a privilege belonging to the redeemed by virtue of their special union with the only-begotten Son of God, which is the privilege they are received to in adoption (WJE 20:480–81).

God gives believers a new sense of divine things, including family membership. In his sermon A Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things Denied to the Unregenerate, Edwards describes this new sense as a child’s intuition of family membership: The child of God doth as it were see and feel the truth of divine things even intuitively . . . ’tis the knowledge that none have but the children of God, and the knowledge that makes those who have it his children (WJE 14:78). In Miscellanies no. 686, Edwards observes that believers experience but do not generate this awareness: He that has such a strong exercise of a divine and holy love to God, he knows at the same time that ’tis not from himself. It is a childlike union of his heart to God, that God himself gives. That this new sense of adopted status is a distinct privilege for New Testament believers proved relevant in the Northampton communion controversy.

The spirit of adoption is best evidenced by filial love expressed in obedience. In Notes on Scripture no. 196, Edwards comments on Galatians 5:18 and describes how the Holy Spirit changes a believer’s relationship to the law: children . . . ben’t so properly under the law as servants. The Spirit effects regeneration and adoption, causing an alteration with respect to them, that renders ’em unapt to be the subjects of the law. The regenerate are hereby assimilated to the Son of God in nature and state. Believers united to the Son are not proper subjects of the law: being sons, it’s suitable that they should be dealt with after another manner; to hold ’em under the law is to treat them as servants (WJE 15:110, 113). Antinomianism is avoided because sonship renders believers beyond the law’s demand while the Spirit inclines them to do what the law requires. Miscellanies no. 790 affirms conduct as more certain evidence of sonship than internal spiritual experience: "But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected (this is ‘the perfect love that casts out fear,’ 1 John 4:18; that is the same with the ‘Spirit of adoption, bearing witness with our spirits, that we are the children of God,’ Rom. 8:15–16): hereby know we that we are in him."

The same Spirit who empowers mortification of sin in Romans 8:12–13 witnesses to the believer’s status as child and heir in 8:17. Edwards concludes that keeping Christ’s commands is the highest evidence of a good estate, and yet the witness of the Spirit of adoption or love is the highest evidence: for they are both the same (WJE 18:486–87).

In Religious Affections, Edwards’s twelfth positive sign that the Spirit has worked graciously is Christian practice. Christian practice is the sign of signs that evidences adoption: The witness or seal of the Spirit . . . doubtless consists in the effect of the Spirit of God in the heart, . . . and so consists in experience. And it is also beyond doubt, that this seal of the Spirit, is the highest kind of evidence of the saints’ adoption, that ever they obtain. Spirit-empowered perseverance under trial offers abundant witness to filial status: It has been abundantly found to be true . . . that Christ commonly gives, by his Spirit, the greatest, and most joyful evidences to his saints, of their sonship, in those most effectual exercises of grace, under trials (WJE 2:444, 454).

Edwards’s view that Christian practice evidences adoption influenced his effort to revise qualifications for admission to the Lord’s Table at Northampton. In An Humble Inquiry, Edwards argues that profession and character were criteria for membership in the primitive church. Anticipating the objection of establishing a precedent for participation not required for Passover participation in Israel, Edwards presents the unique advantage available to postascension Christians of experiencing the spirit of adoption. The spirit of adoption motivates the believer out of love for God to make a public profession of faith and to give evidence of that faith by conduct. Obedience evidences new family status; cherishing new family status motivates obedience.

DAVE SCHUTTER

FURTHER READING

Boston, Thomas. The Fourfold State of Man. Boston, 1720. Reprinted as Human Nature in Its Fourfold State. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1964, 1997.

Mather, Cotton. The Sealed Servants of God. Boston, 1726.

Aesthetics

Numerous Puritan predecessors of Jonathan Edwards had preached that regeneration, or conversion, involved a change in the will of a saint, through divine grace, so that it inclined toward God, and with that change the saint had a special understanding of spiritual matters, for the saint tasted the sweetness of the things of religion. Despite his familiarity with the new learning and the writings of Newton and Locke, Edwards frequently used the traditional lexicon, which he called the old way of speaking. But the new learning led him to what he regarded as a better explanation, at least for philosophic discourse, and led him to preach and write at times from an aesthetic perspective, as in the case of his well-known sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, which was composed in the old lexicon.

The system of aesthetics that Edwards developed owed much to a series of observations and speculations on mental processes and aesthetics that he recorded in a series of notes he called The Mind, much of which was later more formally presented in his work entitled The Nature of True Virtue. In this analytical examination, the observations were Newton-like, and in them he outlined his theory of harmony and aesthetic pleasure as central to understanding spirituality, the nature of God, and spiritual beings such as angels and men. He attempted to fathom the psychology of people at a level impossible in the old way. The treatise began with an unusual assertion, one not expected in a Calvinist or Puritan exposition having to do with how the mind functions within spiritual and nonspiritual contexts, namely, that so-called excellency . . . be what we are more concerned with than anything else whatsoever. That was saying a lot; Edwards was undertaking the redefinition of a fundamental concept. The word excellency was itself not at all unusual and had been used by Wollebius in The Abridgement of Christian Divinity, translated by Alexander Ross, which had replaced Ames’s Medulla at Harvard in the 1670s. No doubt Edwards was breaking new ground, however, when he said of excellency, that there has nothing been more without a definition. With the benefit of the new learning, Edwards proposed to explain what such august Reformed authorities as Thomas Hooker, John Preston, and Peter van Mastricht had taught, but now from the perspective of the spiritual realm, viewed aesthetically as divine harmony or excellency, frequently substantiated with observations of people’s encounters with what might or might not pass as spiritual. He proceeded to offer an aesthetically oriented explanation of central principles of Reformed thought. Veering from the traditional vocabulary of the will, taste, inclination, and sweetness, Edwards instead wrote of harmony and consent, to signify that the will inclining toward God through conversion meant being placed in harmony with divine beauty and the will of God. With the word excellency, he designated the aesthetic nature of the divine creation and of God’s very nature and the saint’s accord with that nature through the Holy Spirit. So powerful did Edwards find the principle that he went on to write of excellency, Yea, we are concerned with nothing else. Once saved, an individual would possess a new power of perception, the ability to perceive spiritual beauty. The saint apprehended spiritual beauty directly through the saint’s feelings, the saint’s response, enabled by the spiritual presence of the Holy Spirit, itself the spiritual, harmonic bond of the Father and the Son. Thus, Edwards connected the theology of the old way with that of what he offered as new, while not at all sacrificing piety to rationalism.

Edwards had read the work of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and perhaps the Earl of Shaftesbury on aesthetics, but as dismissive as he was toward the efforts of most of the so-called rationalists of his time, regarding their theories as merely pertaining to the natural rather than the spiritual world, he agreed with these two. Yes, by its nature the mind organized objects that were perceived and preferred harmonious arrangements; he used illustrations that today’s readers might find stilted—small circles laid out in various regular rather than in contrastive patterns. And he described the elementary principles of aesthetics or harmony as all beauty consisting in similarness or identity of relation, saying that all likeness, and likeness among objects, was essential to their beauty. From here, moving to his epistemological perspective, one based upon his idealism, he claimed that in the opposite relationship lies deformity. With such a foundation he explained the perfection of God as a matter of beauty.

Proposing the existence of laws for spiritual beings that were counterpoints to Newtonian natural laws, he noted that all perceiving beings, in common, by nature, find similarity to be beautiful and dissimilarity to be deformity: And what agrees with being must be agreeable to being in general, and therefore to perceiving being. But agreeableness of perceiving being is pleasure, arid disagreeableness is pain (WJE 6:335).

Remarkably foreshadowing Emerson’s famous declaration in the Divinity School Address that evil is merely privative, Edwards articulated his new explanation of fundamental doctrines in accord with the so-called Augustinian tradition and declared that divine creation constituted excellency, and the greater the spiritual being, the more of it the being could perceive: Disagreement or contrariety to being is evidently an approach to nothing, or a degree of nothing, which is nothing else but disagreement or contrariety of being, and the greatest and only evil; and entity is the greatest and only good. And by how much more perfect entity is, that is, without mixture of nothing, by so much the more excellency (WJE 13:54).

Evil beings can be said to exist, but to the extent that they were evil, they had less being; within the divine scheme, though evil, they in some way were part of the beauty of the whole, as through the justice of their punishment. This implication would later be accentuated by some of Edwards’s New Light followers, who proposed that a saint might be willing to be damned for the glory of God, for such would add to the divine beauty even if it meant unimaginable and unending sufferings.

Edwards’s philosophic expression of his aesthetics, as opposed to his personal experience of spiritual beauty, appears to have relied upon, as with his conception of the sense of the heart, Locke’s theory on human understanding. Traditionally, of course, the Holy Spirit and the teachings on the Trinity applied to saving grace, and Edwards explained the mental processes involved by using Locke’s theory of ideas. In Miscellanies no. 238, Edwards noted for himself, not for readers unfamiliar with Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, that [t]hose ideas which we call ideas of reflection—all ideas of the acts of the mind, such as the ideas of thought, of choice, love, fear, etc.—if we diligently attend to our own minds, we shall find they are not properly representations [i.e., merely ideas of things not encountered through direct experience], but are indeed repetitions of those very things [i.e., ideas of reflection], either more fully or more faintly; they therefore are not properly ideas [not directly and immediately apprehended at the moment] (WJE 13:353). In his Treatise on Grace, Edwards stated further that in receiving the Holy Spirit, the saint’s will or heart was changed so as to harmonize with being, and that the saint in effect had God within him or her, and therefore to a degree could directly perceive and participate in the harmony at the root of all being. But his apprehension of spirit, though indeed at times direct, faded over time, and so became in Lockean terms an idea of reflection.

Differentiating beauty pertaining to the spiritual world from that of the natural world, Edwards held that there are two kinds of beauty. First, a primary beauty, consisting of the "consent, agreement, or union of being to being, which has been spoken of, viz., the union or propensity of minds to mental or spiritual existence" (WJE 8:561). Such was how, now writing in the new way, he could describe the inclination of the will to God. The wills of the saints inclining, from an aesthetic point of view, signified they were in harmony with God, or all being, the beauty of being, pointing in the same direction or consenting, as it were. Only what he called spiritual or moral beings could have this beauty; saints at times, in a so-called gracious frame of mind, were privileged to see this beauty via the sense of the heart, that is, to have the emotional feeling, thereby an apprehension of such beauty, the emotional sensations associated with the will.

On the other hand, there was a beauty that pertained to the ordinary, or natural phenomena that everyone might see; this is what the rationalists had been talking about. Edwards labeled this secondary, and though it is an inferior beauty, it too is characterized by proportion, symmetry, etc. At this point, Edwards announced another dimension of the traditional teaching of conversion signifying the will inclining toward God, this facet resembling a Newtonian law of nature. By a principle of analogy, the things of the natural world parallel those of the spiritual world, and as such function as a way to allow for a degree of understanding of the spiritual world. Indeed, that was the purpose of the natural world, a means of allowing thinking beings to obtain an idea, even if only a representational idea of spirit. Of course, from the perspective of the Lockean sensationalism he had built from, the ideas we have of spiritual matters are merely representations unless we have actually experienced them, existing without direct sensation, except in the presence of the sense of the heart. Secondary beauty could give, however, a partial idea meaningfully standing for a direct view of spiritual beauty. Edwards elaborated on his discovery in diverse writings, from his empirically derived reports on people’s experiences during awakenings to his own personal narrative. Edwards summarized his discovery with the statement in Miscellanies no. 262, Trinity: For indeed, the whole outward creation, which is but the shadows of beings, is so made as to represent spiritual things. . . . And it’s agreeable to God’s wisdom that it should be so, that the inferior and shadowy parts of his works should be made to represent those things that are more real and excellent, spiritual and divine, to represent the things that immediately concern himself and the highest parts of his work. Spiritual things are the crown and glory, the head and soul, the very end and alpha and omega of all other works (WJE 13:434).

TERRENCE ERDT

FURTHER READING

Dyrness, William A. Reformed Theology and Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 240–99.

Erdt, Terrence. Jonathan Edwards: Art and the Sense of the Heart. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Affections

According to Jonathan Edwards, the affections represent the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul (WJE 2:97). As forces stir within the heart, gracious affections bridge the rational and material and promote an active, visceral engagement with the supernatural and spiritual. The Holy Spirit triggers gracious affections as the Christian’s response to God’s excellency, unlocking understanding by enlightening the heart and guiding the individual’s inclination. Although gracious affections arise partly from reason and are always accompanied by ideas, they reflect far more than a notional understanding of an idea "in that the individual feels, senses, and sees the divine truth, beauty, and excellence in the idea and is thus inclined toward the divine presence (Smith 1981–1982, 33). Indeed, proper affections never arise from heat without light, but rather arise from some information of the understanding, some spiritual instruction that the mind receives, some light or actual knowledge" (WJE 2:266).

Gracious affections therefore allow for internal digestion of external revelation, translating perception to apprehension to transformation in character and action. Through the affections, God in his sovereignty communicates to individuals their desperate need for grace and provides the means of receiving and applying this grace through the heart and will. God directs the individual toward repentance, faith, and sanctification, exposing the darkness of depravity and sin’s hideousness, and reveals the contrasting resplendence of God’s excellency. The Spirit then delivers what Edwards calls the indwelling principle of the new sense, empowering the individual to overcome reason’s shortcomings in grasping God’s excellency and giving birth to a proper love of God, which, for Edwards, is the most basic of all affections.

In addition to this new sense, God provides gracious affections to continue divine sanctifying work, bringing unity in the believer’s mind, body, and spirit. This integrity then motivates love and holy desire, exercised in longings, hungerings and thirstings after God and holiness (WJE 2:104). The affections and the desire so caused then give birth to holy practice, that elevated sign of sanctification and perseverance in the saints and the proper lens by which to gauge inward transformation. Ultimately, the affections allow the redeemed person to participate fully in God’s redemptive purposes, allowing the individual to share in God’s Trinitarian love, to the praise of his glory.

Edwards defended the affections in the face of strong opposition. Northampton’s 1734–1735 revival and the Great Awakening supplied ready crucibles for studying how God’s Word and Spirit had brought effective transformation to many—and how others had potentially manipulated raised affections that generated only temporary impact. George Whitefield and other itinerants had adopted ecumenism, eschewing formality and denominational divisions in favor of large-scale evangelism, but, later, James Davenport and others added rabid dissent and fervently charismatic meetings to the revivalist toolkit. Antirevivalists warily watched these radical ministers, whose reputations as anticlerical agitators and enthusiasts eventually became symbolic of the entire prorevivalist camp. These aberrations prompted critics to dismiss the presence of even gracious affections, but Edwards interjected that heart religion required them, in the manner and spirit that God had intended. Without them, the faith would devolve into mere head knowledge and spiritual deadness.

Keenly aware of their role in the Great Awakening’s praiseworthy advances and deplorable excesses, he acknowledged that these affections could have either a natural or a gracious nature, necessitating a careful examination of their sources and effects. Through 1741’s Distinguishing Marks and 1742’s Some Thoughts, he cautioned that apparent emotionalism in some parts should not cause dismissal of the whole revival. He insisted that those who desired to judge the revival should analyze the life-fruit of those touched by the work and not merely the disorderly fervor that certain individuals had incited. In 1746, two years after the Great Awakening had become smothered by enthusiasm and dissent, Edwards published his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, which he hoped would settle many of the theological misunderstandings that the awakening had laid bare.

While antirevivalists skeptically lumped the affections with uncontrollable passions, Edwards argued that gracious affections instead represented the genuine, outward signs of inward rebirth and renewal. Edwards perceived that, if one expects worldly affections to act as the spring of men’s motion and action, then one must acknowledge that the affectionless Christian has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only and never is engaged in the business of religion. For true change to occur, the affections must penetrate the believer’s heart, since the things of religion take hold of men’s souls, no further than they affect them (WJE 2:101). Seeking to expose how individuals may combine the light of doctrinal truth with the heat of a heart passionate to love and serve Christ, Edwards presented the affections as the key connector.

Edwards judged that, through enthusiastic extremes, the devil intended to inject . . . spurious and disfiguring elements into a revival to mislead and stifle its continuance (Lovelace 1995, 30). He countered the enthusiasts by urging that the Holy Spirit would only enlighten the Mind to understand and realize truths already revealed (Warch 1971, 193). Still, Edwards worried that oppositional forces would turn even well-intentioned pastors away from heart religion and toward the other extreme of doctrinally pure but spiritually dead convention. By denouncing the affections and thus shut[ting] out the power of godliness, the critics of the revivals had left all true Christianity turned out of doors (WJE 2:120).

Edwards held that observers should take care to distinguish the affections by their source and effect. While antirevivalists questioned even gracious affections, Edwards took care to differentiate between (a) gracious and natural affections and (b) the affections’ strength (heat) and character. He recommended a testing to identify the affections’ source—and their consequent value. Acknowledging that the Spirit, the flesh, and Satan could bring forth affections, Edwards delineated between (1) gracious affections, bringing the individual under God’s sovereign control, and (2) animalistic passions, which left the mind less in its own command. Instead of a for-or-against mentality, Edwards applied his genius to seek a middle course, exploring the very core of New Testament faith.

Edwards reasoned that, in divine sovereignty, God apparently placed the affections, such as self-aggrandizing pride or sincere love for God, as the motivating catalyst for action. Without the influence of some affection—either love or hatred, desire, hope, fear or some other—humans would not become engaged in life’s pursuits or ever obtain the vigor that marks one who is truly alive. Edwards did not flinch at mentioning that the affections need not have divine inspiration; indeed, he highlighted that covetousness, ambition, and hedonism also stem from human affections, which sustain continual commotion and agitation. Without them, there would be no motivation or explanation for human action, no vehicle for bringing thoughts to life. Through the affections, Edwards believed that one could see the center and unity of the self and an exposition of the priorities within one’s soul (WJE 2:14).

Believing that true religion lies very much in the affections, Edwards wrestled extensively with the mixed nature of the affections (WJE 2:118–19). In his view, the affections’ impact reveals their source: genuinely gracious affections come from God alone, to the praise of divine glory, while natural affections instead exalt man or serve Satan’s evil purposes. Given the heart’s deceitfulness, the saints required true divine love to display true affections, while from a counterfeit love in like manner, naturally flow other false affections. Edwards highlighted that gracious affections demonstrate beautiful symmetry and proportion, in imitation of God’s glorious order. He likened them to fixed stars—constant, proportional, and beautiful—but natural affections he compared to wandering, unreliable comets—brilliant for a moment but distant or nonexistent for long stretches (WJE 2:150, 365, 373–74).

Edwards seconded antirevivalists’ skepticism of enthusiasts’ claims that fervent and sometimes bodily affections somehow signified God’s presence and approval. He expected that God’s genuine work would call forth perseverance in sanctification and the pursuit of holiness, not just short-term fireworks. Even with dissipating heat, those under gracious affections thirst and hunger more deeply for spiritual attainments, chiefly in desiring more of God’s excellency, while those displaying false affections rest satisfied in themselves (WJE 2:376).

The Holy Spirit, Edwards taught, enlightened the heart through gracious affections, imparting a new sense and bringing truth to bear in life and heart. Edwards recognized early on that only with a proper knowledge of God’s excellency would individuals desire God and seek to mirror the divine character. Reason and truth alone do not bring about inward transformation, as the unredeemed see nothing in Christ wherefore they should desire him; no beauty or comeliness to draw or incline their hearts to him (sermon on Romans 5:10, no. 405, August 1736, WJEO 51). Without God’s intervention, individuals cannot demonstrate any denomination or character of being spiritual (WJE 2:201). Edwards compared the common—that is, nonsaving—grace in the Spirit’s work to the shining of light on a dark body, since the body will neither reflect any light nor produce any of its own. In a natural state, a person resists what God had prescribed for the person to do in order to glorify God.

Edwards encapsulated the transformational catalyst as the new sense, which yielded a spiritual change of nature and prominently marked the Spirit’s regeneration and the root of all holy affection. This doctrine of the new sense notably removed the customary dichotomy of cognition and affection, of head and heart (WJE 2:326, 340, 394–95; McClymond 1998, 12).

Through the affections, the Holy Spirit transforms an opinion of God’s excellency into a sense of it. Effective grace thus inclines the heart towards God and divine things, with such strength and vigor, that these holy exercises do prevail in him above all carnal or natural affections (WJE 2:100). Not mere momentary guidance, this new sense realigns the soul’s faculties according to the Spirit’s direction and engenders ongoing holiness.

Edwards further believed that gracious affections brought forth spiritual fruit in godly practice. Having received this new sense, individuals would demonstrate the inward change through a virtuous life, avoiding self-love and embracing an adoration of God. Having reoriented the believer’s faculties, the Spirit prepares the individual to experience those gracious affections that transform truth into action. The believer’s practice testifies to true changes that the Spirit had wrought, as the motion of the blood and animal spirits begins to be sensibly altered through those exercises . . . vigorous enough to carry the self well beyond indifference (WJE 2:96–97).

For Edwards, holy love, motivated by a sincerely benevolent propensity of the soul, towards God and man, both demonstrated and promoted gracious affections. The believer then finds the essence of all true religion, since from a vigorous, affectionate, and fervent love to God, will necessarily arise other religious affections. Edwards also called the saints to imitate the Lord Jesus Christ, pointing out his tender and affectionate heart, which filled him with compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Likewise, compelled by the gloriousness of God and his works on their behalf, the saints in heaven will inevitably have their hearts moved to deep love (WJE 2:107–8, 111, 114). Edwards urged nothing less for the saints on earth, as a life void of gracious affections denies God his rightful thanksgiving.

Finally, in Edwards’s conception, the affections achieve God’s purposes in creation and redemption, bringing praise to God, wholeness to the person, and eternal enjoyment of mutual love. Edwards understood that, through the affections, the individual brings glory to each person of the Trinity, at once praising and responding to Christ’s sweetness and the Father’s providence through the Spirit’s illumination. Furthermore, Edwards believed that, through the new sense, God reintegrates the faculties of the mind, the will, and inclination. This regeneration makes the soul a partaker of God’s beauty and Christ’s joy, so that the saint has truly fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ, in thus having the communion or participation of the Holy Ghost (WJE 2:201). This resulting union with God completes God’s redemptive purposes, ensuring that (a) the whole Trinity conjunctly and each person singly might be exceedingly glorified, (b) the bride of Christ shall have unhindered access to this fountain of love, this eternal three in one, and (c) that both Creator and creatures shall forever be continued in the perfect enjoyment of each other’s love (History of Redemption, WJE 9:125; Heaven Is a World of Love, WJE 8:382–83).

STEVE EDWARDS

FURTHER READING

Lovelace, Richard F. The Surprising Works of God: Jonathan Edwards on Revival, Then and Now. Christianity Today 39 (September 11, 1995): 28–32.

McClymond, Michael J. Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Smith, John E. Testing the Spirits: Jonathan Edwards and the Religious Affections. Union Seminary Quarterly 37 (Fall-Winter 1981–1982): 27–37.

Stephens, Bruce M. Changing Conceptions of the Holy Spirit in American Protestant Theology from Jonathan Edwards to Charles G. Finney. Saint Luke’s Journal of Theology 33 (June 1990): 209–23.

Warch, Richard. School of the Prophets: Yale College, 1701–1740. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.

Agency/Volition

Foundational to an Edwardsean theological anthropology, agency and volition are crucial for understanding not only God but also humans in relation to God. Central to understanding human salvation, the affections (Religious Affections, pt. 3, sec. 7; WJE 2:253–66), faith, and human purpose (as benevolence to Being in general), both divine and human agency are construed by Edwards to be the freedom to do what one desires and not as the freedom to do otherwise.

All agent choices are not only caused but also determined, broadly speaking. For Edwards, this applies both to God and to humans (Freedom of the Will, pt. 1, sec. 2, II; WJE 1:145–48). Edwards rejects the theological libertarian thesis that an agent’s volitions are not determined or caused, but instead holds that agents are free to choose otherwise. Edwards is a global determinist, meaning that all created and noncreated agent actions or events are caused by the agent’s desires/affections and ultimately determined by God. Divine volitions are no less free than human volitions, yet all physical events and human choices are not only dependent upon the divine mind, but are determined as divine ideas, which leads to two theses important for understanding Edwardsean agency. First, he is committed to idealistic immaterialism and a rejection of materialist ontology. Second, he is committed to radical theocentrism and human responsibility.

Consider first Edwards’s rejection of materialist ontology and his affirmation of divine idealism. Edwards believes that all actions are reducible to or dependent upon minds (i.e., idealism). But in some sense all human minds are dependent upon the divine mind. This understanding is important for understanding Edwards’s view of agency in two ways. First, Edwards does not affirm that the material exists independently, hence his commitment to rule out materialism and material determinism. Additionally, his understanding of determinism is that human action (along with everything else) is dependent upon the divine mind and the divine mental agency.

Second, Edwards is committed to the notion that the world is radically God-centered (given that God is the only true substance), yet humans are responsible agents. On the surface, there is a seeming tension between the notion of God’s being the only true substance and the notion of human responsibility. However, one can make sense of this in terms of Edwards’s commitment to the world’s necessarily being determined by God’s mind, yet with respect to human agentive actions God’s determination should not be construed according to physical laws or mathematical laws (e.g., 1 + 1 = 2). Instead, Edwards distinguishes between natural and moral ability to make sense of necessitarianism (Freedom of the Will, pt. 1, secs. 4–5; WJE 1:156–67), God’s determinism, and human agency. Edwards believes that the natural and moral distinction sustains both and allows for a radically personal universe. Human agents bear the property of natural ability in the sense that the will is unfettered by external constraint and that humans have natural power to choose otherwise. However, human moral ability implies that human ability is limited by human desires in the sense that humans are morally incapable of doing good, and this is in keeping with the liberty of spontaneity. Philosophically, then, Edwards is a compatibilist in that he affirms both human responsibility in terms of man’s natural ability and divine determination concerning all events including human choices (semicompatibilism may apply to Edwards’s view, namely, the position of agnosticism toward free will in relation to determinism, yet the belief that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism). As such, some additional component is required for humans to exhibit true freedom (namely, Godself). Assuming that additional component in the Edwardsean sense means to have the right moral desires or the appropriate sense, which moves the volition.

Some important contemporary questions emerge in this context. First, to what extent does Edwards draw from and depart from his Reformed forebears, who often assumed an Aristotelian view of agency? As stated above, Edwards assumes an Aristotelian human substance weakly construed as mental property-bearers where ideas are the determiners of volitional acts. Furthermore, Edwards affirms not only efficient causality (as some contemporaries assume), but also formal and final causality (following from his view that humans are minds with purposeful intention). Second, a recent question has emerged in Edwardsean studies concerning the notion of the liberty of indifference and whether Edwards assumes a liberty of indifference in any sense (e.g., contingency, etc.).

JOSHUA R. FARRIS

FURTHER READING

Crisp, Oliver D. Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Chs. 1 and 3.

Helm, Paul. Jonathan Edwards and the Parting of Ways? Jonathan Edwards Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 42–60.

McCann, Hugh, and Oliver D. Crisp. Edwards on Free Will. In Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, edited by Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp, ch. 3. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2003.

Muller, Richard A. Jonathan Edwards and the Absence of Free Choice: A Parting of Ways in the Reformed Tradition. Jonathan Edwards Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 3–22.

Aging

Early in life Edwards recognized that aging was a reality and had to be faced. How to live well and age well became a serious consideration for him. Edwards believed that God was to be honored and glorified in all stages of life.

Edwards underscored his attitude, resolve, and determination on aging when he wrote his Resolutions early in his ministry. In Resolution no. 52 he stated, Resolved, . . . I will live just as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age, which, in his view of the life cycle in those days, started at age fifty. Edwards also stated his views on death in Resolution no. 9: "Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death" (WJE 16:757, 753).

Aging was a journey not to be taken lightly. While the aging process for each individual was designed by God, one’s role was to learn from those of advanced age. Edwards desired to actively promote holy living among those believers who were advancing in age, as well as learn from them. He felt constrained to confront and engage unbelievers about their aging status and preparedness for eternity.

His eagerness to learn from others is seen in two of his Resolutions. Resolution no. 2 states, Resolved, to be continually endeavoring to find out some new invention and contrivance. And in Resolution no. 28 he writes, Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same (WJE 16:753, 755). In aging, like any subject, he was devoted to an ongoing learning process from which he could personally benefit and enrich his spiritual life and his ministry.

As he reflected on the aging process of his older parishioners, he also reflected on his own age and the ministry before him. He did not want to live or die with regrets, regardless of his age at the time he died. Therefore, how well one aged and died was a reflection of a pattern of acknowledging and honoring God in one’s life.

Perhaps Edwards engaged many of his older parishioners in conversation on this topic while ministering in New York and later in Bolton and Northampton. From his personal observations of the elderly in the church, he came to reformulate his initial attitudes on aging, death, and dying. When he later served as an assistant pastor to his grandfather, his more personal understanding and attitude on aging further developed, unfortunately, for the worse.

Edwards’s experience with the older people in his congregations came to be significantly different from his theology of aging and his early intent to appreciate aging and the aged. Edwards’s writings indicate that he came to hold a negative attitude about the elderly, which was somewhat common for his times. He gradually developed a fairly strong negative view, attended with a state of great frustration, toward the elderly, to the point of outright hostility at times. He did not appreciate the patriarchal hierarchy, the lackadaisical support of the Great Awakenings by the elderly, and their resistance to being involved in the work of his ministry. In contrast, the efforts, support, and involvement of the young and the women were much appreciated. Ultimately and sadly, it was the elderly portion of the congregation in Northampton that led the charge against him that eventually resulted in his removal from the pastorate there. It appears that they became as frustrated with him as he was with them.

During his years of ministry, Edwards grew in his perspective on death. As a pastor and as a family man, he was well aware that death could come early for many. Death was no stranger to him; he knew and experienced death deeply as he laid to rest many from his congregation as well as two sisters and one of his young children—while not many, compared to other families, these experiences of loss by death were for him profound. He became keenly aware of the different ways of dying and the grace, or lack of grace, by which people age and depart from this earth. He was profoundly affected by his parishioners who spoke of what they would have done differently had they had an opportunity to live longer.

For Edwards, contentment with one’s status in life and one’s physical body was the godly attitude and thought process to be sought. Aging and death were not to be feared, but rather to be embraced as God’s ultimate reality for humanity.

ALLAN G. HEDBERG

FURTHER READING

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Minkema, Kenneth P. Old Age and Religion in the Life and Writings of Jonathan Edwards. Church History 70 (2001): 674–704.

Allegorical Method

Jonathan Edwards’s perception of an allegorical dimension within Scripture and nature placed him in a biblical poetics movement inaugurated during the Protestant Reformation. The ad fontes quest of the period, both literary and philological, contributed to the rediscovery of a symbolic reading of the biblical text that held not only literal and historical, but also spiritual, meaning. The allegorical and typological interpretation of Scripture loomed large in his theology, as evidenced in his commentaries and notebooks. His perception of nature as a deep theological construct intertextually woven with biblical revelation is a hallmark of the emblematic worldview embraced by other early modern evangelicals. Edwards reunited general and special revelation (the book of nature and the book of Scripture) into an enchanted text originally designed by God to illuminate and entertain the readers.

Edwards’s view of allegory and its pedagogical benefits is outlined clearly in his 1728 sermon Profitable Hearers of the Word (WJE 14:243–77). At the beginning of his exposition of the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:3–23), Edwards gives several reasons why Christ taught in parables and why Scripture often instructs through allegory. Edwards notes that the allegorical method is a condescension designed to engage people’s childlike imagination and love of story (Edwards 2012, 32). Allegory engages associative thought processes and enables communication of concepts and subjects that would otherwise be difficult to understand without the aid of analogy and comparison. Allegory is not only an instructive strategy, but it also promotes mental fitness. In contrast to sermonic strategies that strain for alphabetic simplicity, Edwards was convinced that God teaches in such a way that we shall have some exercise (WJE 14:246). The same allegorical method adapted to childlike wonder also challenges the mind with riddles and puzzles. The mental effort required to get at the meaning of the allegory increases the pleasure of the prize. Edwards compares the allegorical teachings of Scripture to precious metals or jewels hidden deep underground. The strenuous activity of mining greatly increases the preciousness of the treasure.

Allegory is God’s method of revelation not only in the biblical text, but also in the created order itself. The plenitude of allegory is on full display in Edwards’s tables and indexes of Scriptures and subjects appended to his notebook Images of Divine Things (WJE 11:50–142). Images unveils the intensely systematic nature of Edwards’s allegorical world. Edwards’s worldview resonated with the Neoplatonic thought of John Scotus Eriugena and Hugh of St. Victor. In metaphysical symbolism and universal allegory, a thoughtful gaze upon the earth will reveal a theophanic harmony. Sensitivity to this aesthetic harmony moves the viewer to seek intelligibility in the design, and to perceive the universe allegorically, as a book written by the Creator to the creature. Universal allegory held that the world was open to exegesis in the same manner as the Bible.

ROBERT L. BOSS

FURTHER READING

Edwards, Jonathan. Sermons by Jonathan Edwards on the Matthean Parables. Vol. 3, Divine Husbandmen (On the Parable of the Sower and the Seed). Edited by Kenneth P. Minkema and Adriaan C. Neele. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012.

Lewalski, Barbara Keifer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Lowance, Mason I., Jr. The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300). Vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Allegory and Typology

The roots of the Greek term for allegory derive from the words allos, other, and agoreuein, to speak. Originally allegory was a method of interpretation; in Greek philosophy it was used to reinterpret myths and tales of gods. In the Roman tradition, allegory came to denote a poetical practice in the sense of expressing meaning in a dark or metaphorical way. In literary history, the term has also stood for figurative meaning in general. In biblical hermeneutics, allegorical interpretation was used by Jewish exegetes (and later also by Christian theologians) to interpret the Song of Solomon in particular. Allegory is found in the canonical texts of the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:9), though in a lesser degree than typology.

Figurative interpretation of the Bible was greatly developed by the church fathers. Origen divided the meaning of Scripture into three senses (literal, moral, and allegorical or spiritual). A fourth meaning was added later by Jerome and Augustine, the anagogical or eschatological sense, and the tradition of the fourfold method of biblical interpretation flourished until the Reformers rejected it and replaced it with a notion of a twofold sense of Scripture, literal-historical and spiritual. They agreed that New Testament writers themselves sometimes used allegory but rejected a pervasive allegorical hermeneutic as merely a human contrivance and misinterpretation of the Word; typology, however, was used widely by them. English Puritans followed the same emphasis.

The distinction between allegory and type is not always easy to define. Both are forms of figurative interpretation. While types pertain especially to the correspondences between the Old and the New Testament, and in its stricter sense typology is distinguished by a historical correspondence and fulfillment, allegory lacks a specific historical dimension, there is no foreshadowing and fulfillment, and it is more abstract. However, typology was often extended to mark other analogies beyond those found directly in the Bible, and the distinction between types and other forms of figurative interpretation would then become less clear.

This principle of extension beyond Scripture is also the case with Edwards’s typological interpretation and applies particularly to his natural types as found in Images of Divine Things and to his theory in the Types notebook. Something of Edwards’s search for a better way to describe his expanded typology is reflected in the various titles he used for the Images notebook (images, shadows, language and lessons, book of nature), suggesting that he might have considered natural types to be, after all, different from scriptural types. Moreover, even in some of his definitions of the type, Edwards comes close to the ancient understanding of allegory as hiding true meaning (Types of the Messiah, WJE 11:192–93; and Notes on Scripture no. 288, WJE 15:247–48). While Edwards certainly does not practice allegorical interpretation of Scripture in the sense of the medieval allegorical interpretation, some of his typological interpretations go far beyond the traditional correspondences between the Old and the New Testament and might more appropriately be described as, simply, figurative.

ANNA SVETLIKOVA

FURTHER READING

Büchsel, Friedrich. Allegoreo. In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 1, edited by Gerhard Kittel, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, p. 260. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964.

Copeland, Rita, and Peter T. Struck. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, edited by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, pp. 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

America

Restricting the discussion of America to Edwards’s millennialism, we can see that his theological views on America, its settlement, the spread of the gospel in it, and the revivals of religion he witnessed in New England changed over time. As a young man, Edwards described himself as keenly interested in news that could be in any way related to the progress of God’s kingdom on earth, including political, social, and religious changes. In his eschatological reflections he kept looking for signs of the times and related historical events to biblical prophecies and the book of Revelation. Later in life, when he was involved in revivals of religion, Edwards claimed that such revivals were a prelude to the coming of the millennium. In Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, he devotes an entire section to the argument that the millennium is probably to dawn in America. In an array of detailed arguments, he interprets America as the distant isles that will come to the Lord according to Isaiah 60:9. He argues that the New World will exceed the Old World spiritually, that there may be an equality, and inasmuch as that [old] continent has crucified Christ (WJE 4:354). Moreover, God often begins a more excellent state of church where it had not been till then. And it will be no wonder that the Sun of Righteousness shall rise in the west, meaning in America; God will so alter the course of nature to accomplish the most excellent spiritual state of the earthly church. Edwards concludes his argument by suggesting that if we consider the circumstances of the settlement of New England, it must needs appear that the most likely of all American colonies, to be the place whence this work shall principally take its rise (WJE 4:358). Similar hope is expressed in Images of Divine Things no. 147, on America supplying the world with spiritual treasures.

However, Edwards’s confidence of the early 1740s does not last, and such bold interpretations in favor of America do not reappear in his later writings. Mark Noll points out that as early as 1744 Edwards was backing away from an eschatology with New England as the center, and by the late 1740s he held that Israel was a type of spiritual blessings . . . not of other geographic countries or national peoples (2002, 466n70, and p. 48). In A History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards again interprets the settling of America and the evangelization of the original inhabitants in an eschatological framework, but in much more modest terms. In sermon 24, which discusses the growth of God’s kingdom from the Reformation to the present time, America is but one of many places in which the work of redemption makes significant progress and holds no special place in a list that includes Russia and Asia. In fact, while Edwards interprets the settling of America and the evangelization of heathen nations in America as a clear sign of the progress of the work of redemption, his assessment of the current situation, while hopeful toward the future, has nothing of the confident optimism of Some Thoughts. Instead, he speaks of but a small propagation of the gospel among the heathen and observes that a "great part of America is now full of Bibles, and full of at least the form of worship of the true God. The discovery and evangelization of America are but one thing by which divine providence is preparing the way" for the millennium (WJE 9:434, emphasis added). Revivals of religion in New England are named alongside revivals in Saxony, and no suggestion is made of any exceptional connection between New England and the dawning of the millennium. In sermon 27 of the Redemption discourse, again, Edwards does not differentiate between America, which in so great part of it is covered with barbarous ignorance and cruelty, and other non-Christian countries around the world where Satan’s heathenish kingdom (WJE 9:472) will be overthrown with the coming of Christ’s reign.

In this respect, it appears that Edwards should not be linked too easily to ideas of American exceptionalism or Manifest Destiny, despite his early optimism that he might have been witnessing the approaching millennium in the revivals in Northampton. Scholars have, however, paid considerable attention to Edwards’s postmillennial views and their connection to the tradition of a civil millennium, which played an important role at the time of the American Revolution and the early republic. In that tradition, emphasis was often placed on the unique situation of America and the new democratic republic was hailed as the highest stage of social progress of humankind. While Edwards thought of himself as a British subject, some of his postmillennial emphases, combined with his early attention to the possibly unique connection between America and the millennium, may be seen to have contributed to the tradition of American civil millennialism, especially as these have been appropriated and transformed by later authors and divines. Mason Lowance argues that the American millennial vision of authors like Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau had its paradigm in New England Puritan interpretations of the Bible, including Edwards’s millennial interpretations. Edwards’s vision of the confluence of civil and technological progress with the progress of God’s kingdom, such as in Miscellanies nos. 46, 147, and 262, can certainly be placed within that tradition. On the other hand, even where Edwards speculates about America’s unique role in the dawning of the millennium, he does so on the basis of spiritual renewal and growing religious faith, not on the basis of social or political progress, and later he abandons the idea altogether in favor of a truly global vision of the progress of the work of redemption.

ANNA SVETLIKOVA

FURTHER READING

Lowance, Mason I., Jr. The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Wilson, John F. Editor’s Introduction. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9, A History of the Work of Redemption, edited by John F. Wilson, pp. 1–108. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Ames, William (1576–1633)

Ames was born in Ipswich, England, into a family with Puritan sympathies. In 1594, he entered Christ’s College at Cambridge University, a center of Puritanism and Ramist philosophy. At Cambridge, Ames experienced dramatic spiritual transformation under the preaching of William Perkins (1558–1602), whose theology furnished many of Ames’s own emphases. After earning bachelor’s (1598) and master’s (1601) degrees, he became a fellow at Christ’s College. In 1610, exasperated with the increasing conformist pressures in England, Ames moved to Holland to carry out the Puritan cause.

Ames secured a reputation throughout Europe as a highly regarded theologian. He served as the theological adviser to the presiding officer at the Synod of Dort, taught at the University of Franeker, and wrote voluminously. His most prominent works were Medulla theologiae (1631; translated into English as The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, 1642) and De conscientia (1631; Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof, 1642).

In seventeenth-century New England, Ames’s legacy represented both orthodox theology and the heart of Puritan piety. He had close ties with several early New England leaders, such as Hugh Peter, John Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, and Nathaniel Eaton. The Marrow of Sacred Divinity was standard reading at Harvard and Yale, and his Technometria played a key role in the development of the curriculum. His writings on nonseparating congregationalism greatly informed New England ecclesiology—as reflected in the Cambridge Platform of 1648—and his covenantalism laid the foundation for what many New England theologians termed the unconditional covenant of grace.

In Ramist fashion, Ames defined theology as the doctrine of living to God (Medulla 1.1). He dismissed the study of metaphysics and ethics as Aristotelian inventions, arguing that right reason and morality did not exist by nature in men and women due to their corrupt wills. For Ames, right living (eupraxia)—which he regarded as humankind’s highest purpose for existence—arose from conforming one’s will to God’s will. Knowing God’s will necessitated divine revelation, and right living to God required a spiritual regeneration of the will. Thus, contra the intellectualist tradition, Ames argued that the first and proper subject of theology is the will, not the intellect (Medulla 1.9). Ames perpetuated the Augustinian voluntarist tradition and set it within an archetype-ectype covenantalist framework that identified the will as the center of piety. This framework largely grounded practical theology in New England.

Jonathan Edwards owned many of Ames’s writings, and he drew from his covenantalism, ecclesiology, and casuistry. While Edwards’s favorite theologian was Peter van Mastricht (1630–1706), Mastricht professed his indebtedness to Ames, as evidenced in his theoretico-practica paradigm. Like Ames and Mastricht, Edwards equated the will with the passions or affections, stressing that right practice stemmed from a regenerated will and not primarily from an enlightened understanding. This Augustinian voluntarist notion was central to the theology of the Great Awakening, of which Edwards was a leading voice.

RYAN P. HOSELTON

FURTHER READING

Fiering, Norman. Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

———. Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Sprunger, Keith L. The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

Angels

Edwards’s angelology is traditional and operates within a medieval progressive framework of creation, fall, and confirmation. Moreover, his interest in angels was especially focused on their being, mission, and function as they relate to Jesus Christ. He was not as concerned with their innate wisdom or substance as he was with their purpose.

Edwards’s approach to angels began much like his contemporaries’ and predecessors’, by relying on biblical exegesis. He saw angels as having a role in glorifying God in Christ and in the lives of humans as part of God’s plan for salvation. Angelology was thus a corollary to Christology. He did, however, move beyond scriptural exegesis and entertained speculation, though he was aware that he could not completely ascertain the supernatural work of God, much less the work of a celestial being higher in nature and stature than himself. As rational as Edwards was, he often qualified his conclusions regarding angels with I suppose and it is probable.

Angels are exalted in both nature and faculty above humankind’s physical and experiential boundaries. They excel in both wisdom and strength, and were created spiritual beings of a higher order than man. While advanced in dignity and honor, they are bounded by limitations of space and are subject to temptation. Edwards speculated that the fall of the angels was rooted in their jealousy of humans, for God had declared his love for humanity and made the angels ministers to those who were beneath them in the created order. So they were tempted, and one-third of them rebelled. As was true of humans, however, the eternal judgment of nonelect angels had been decreed by God. Edwards saw the unfallen angels united with Christ as a part of his body. He understood Christ as the head of angels, for all things had been put under Christ’s feet. Furthermore, Edwards concluded that the elect angels were confirmed when Christ was placed as their head at the time of his ascension, and therefore they could not fall afterward, as they were united with him in body. This means that angels are also dependent on Christ for their eternal life.

Angels are ministering spirits sent by God to serve the saints and those who would be heirs of salvation. By this, angels are made inferior to humanity. As messengers, servants, and ministers, they possess ministerial dominion over what is given to them by God to carry out his will. Edwards saw that God had created angels for specialized tasks, and their faithfulness to these tasks would be the condition of their heavenly reward.

Angels function as messengers, servants, and ministers possessing dominion over what has been given to them by God to carry out his will. Edwards believed angels deliver specific messages from God, overseeing specific churches as well as individuals. They are incapable of understanding and managing the affairs of the entire universe, or carrying out the whole extent of God’s providence, and are appointed, therefore, to particular affairs and kinds of work.

JOHN T. LOWE

FURTHER READING

McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 273–94.

Pauw, Amy Plantinga. Where Theologians Fear to Tread. Modern Theology 16 (January 2000): 39–59.

Anti-Catholicism

Growing up in early-eighteenth-century New England, Jonathan Edwards was weaned on the tradition of Protestant anti-Catholicism that continued to be reinforced by repeated wars against Roman Catholic France. Works such as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments were standard reading in Puritan New England, and encouraged an understanding of Catholicism as a religious system bent on the persecution of God’s true church—a supposition apparently borne out by Foxe’s