Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths

Church History, Sept, 2001 by Amy Plantinga Pauw

Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. By Gerald R. McDermott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiv 245 pp. $45.00 cloth.

In this important book, Gerald McDermott starts with a perplexing set of questions he encountered in his research on Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758): Why, in the last two decades of his life, was Edwards so fascinated with the religious views of the "ancient heathens"? Why would a Northampton pastor care about Pythagoras's opinions on correct worship? Why would a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians be interested in the trinitarian views of ancient Chinese philosophers? McDermott's persuasive answer requires a significant re-visioning of Edwards's theological project. Edwards, he argues, "dedicated his career to deism's destruction" (34).

While Arminianism may have been Edwards's local nemesis, McDermott shows that Edwards was acutely aware of the advance of deism in England during the first three decades of the eighteenth century, and that he anticipated its arrival on colonial shores. Figures like John Toland, Matthew Tindal, and Thomas Chubb ridiculed the particularity of Christian revelation as damning the vast majority of the earth's inhabitants to hell. In the natural wisdom of the ancient heathens the deists found grounds for refuting the need for special revelation and for rejecting absurd Christian doctrines like atonement and original sin. One of Edwards's main responses was to turn this favorite weapon of the deists against them. Following the apologetic bent of contemporary sources like Chevalier Ramsay, Theophilus Gale, and Philip Skelton, Edwards defended the Christian faith by insisting on striking similarities between Christian orthodoxy and the utterances of the ancient heathens on controversial doctrinal subjects ranging from hell's torments to infused grace to the Trinity.

McDermott found his evidence for this fascination with ancient religious views in Edwards's private notebooks, the "Miscellanies." In fact, he estimates that about a quarter of the entries are devoted to anti-deist arguments. Now being published in their entirety by the Yale edition for the first time, these notebooks are changing the way scholars think about both Edwards's intellectual development and his established corpus. In McDermott's case, the "Miscellanies" entries during the 1740s and 1750s make possible a new reading of the great works of the Stockbridge period, including Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, and The End of Creation, as part of a concerted effort to respond to deist attacks on Christian orthodoxy.

In appealing to the religious views of the ancient heathen, Edwards followed a long Christian tradition of prisca theologia, or ancient theology, which McDermott helpfully dubs "trickle down revelation" (94). On this apologetic theory, whose historical plausibility was already being undermined in Edwards's day, the human race originally received special revelation via God's people Israel, beginning with the sons of Noah after the Flood. This revelation, as it passed down to the Greeks and other non-Christians, was gradually diluted and corrupted by foreign elements, by a process McDermott calls "religious entropy" (97). In interesting chapters devoted to Judaism, Islam, Greece and Rome, American Indians, and Chinese philosophers, McDermott shows how Edwards's varying responses to these religious "others" were conditioned by the patterns of deist appeals to them.

Despite his evident enthusiasm for Edwards's assault on deism, McDermott does not shy away from blunt critique of Edwards's apologetic methods. The "strange, new Edwards" (3) McDermott discovers turns out to be a tendentious historian who plundered ancient sources with a ruthless disregard for context. McDermott implies, but does not explicitly affirm, the intellectual bankruptcy of the prisca theologia tradition. As was the case for many of his contemporaries (including the deists), Edwards's "encounter with others often amounted to self-congratulation and self-projection rather than reliable description of the other" (10).

Edwards's expanded view of typology and his dispositional understanding of salvation are set forth as more promising guides for encountering the religious other. The effect of both is to extend God's revelatory presence in history and nature and even in the souls of the unconverted. But McDermott acknowledges that Edwards's use of typology and disposition can be seen as trail markers for interreligious paths Edwards himself never pursued, either in his writings or in his only sustained contact with non-Christians, in Stockbridge. Though he compares Edwards favorably to his Reformed predecessors, McDermott admits that "Edwards was not really open to other religions as viable, living faiths" (12).

I am persuaded by McDermott's analysis. But it would have been interesting for him to reflect more on the ambiguities of Edwards's pastoral experience in Northampton, among parishioners who had full access to the truths of special revelation. For it is there that we see Edwards furthest removed from the rationalist agenda set by the deists. Edwards as pastor was clear that the line between access to true revelation and salvation was at best indirect--even the devil had a perfect "notional" knowledge of Christian truth. And that line became perhaps even more indirect with growing pastoral experience. While as a young pastor in the early 1730s, Edwards could argue that "[a] false notion gives no opportunity for grace to act" (61); another decade of ministry convinced him that "there may be true exercises of grace ... that may be founded on an error, that which is not agreeable to the truth, and that the erroneous practice founded on that error may be the occasion of those true and holy exercises which are from the Spirit of God" (Miscellanies, no. 999, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 20, ed. Amy Plantinga Pauw [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2002]). If this is true for Christians, could it not be true for non-Christians as well? Edwards's insistence on the mysteries of the Spirit's presence and on love as the definitive mark of saving faith may in the end constitute his most effective response to "Enlightenment religion."