Response to Gilbert: "The nations will worship: Jonathan Edwards and the salvation of the heathen"

Trinity Journal, Spring 2002 by McDermott, Gerald R

Mr. Gilbert tries to show that Edwards never considered the possibility that a person could be saved without knowledge of the doctrines of the gospel that comes through Christian preaching. Gilbert thinks that by repeating Edwards's first line from Miscellanies 27b ("It is clear, both from Scripture and reason, that there must be a reception of Christ with the faculties of the soul in order to salvation-by him") he has clinched his case-that Edwards never considers salvation without explicit knowledge of the doctrines of the gospel. Yet in this same entry Edwards speaks of "the ancient Jews before Christ" who

were saved without the sensible exertions of those acts in that manner which is represented as necessary by some divines, because they had not those occasions nor were under circumstances that would draw them out.

Edwards clearly means the OT saints who never had explicit knowledge of Christ or the doctrines of the gospel.

How could Edwards say both-that Christ must be received with the soul and that Jews could be saved without "sensible" reception of Christ? Gilbert himself concedes the answer-that for Edwards, as for all great theologians, there are "normal circumstances" (Gilbert's words) and abnormal circumstances. Normally, for Edwards, there is no separation between a disposition and its exercise. But life is messy and sometimes impervious to neat rules drawn by some systematic theologians: as in the cases of OT saints and infants who die.

Edwards recognized that these were "abnormal cases," just as he argued that baptism "ordinarily" but not always seals salvation. In Miscellanies 27b and elsewhere, he acknowledged that many OT figures were saved but did not know Christ (except typologically, as he argues elsewhere, which raises all sorts of implications for Christ's presence in other religions that Edwards himself explored but Gilbert oddly ignores).

Edwards also recognized that, in another "abnormal" case, elect infants can have a saving disposition without the opportunity to exercise it (Book of Controversies, 65). Gilbert dismisses this abnormality by asserting that Edwards would never have extended covenantal benefits to the heathen (a wonderful illustration of assuming what one tries to prove). He also wrongly states, here and elsewhere in his article, that infants (and others) are "saved by their disposition" [sic]. Edwards's soteriology held that Christ and Christ alone saves, and disposition is simply a sign of election. But the point of infants with saving dispositions is that here is another instance where Edwards allowed for regeneration without knowledge of gospel doctrines-particularly when elect infants died in infancy.

This does not deny that faith and its underlying disposition are exercised "sensibly." Edwards could insist on the latter while also saying that unexercised dispositions will be expressed sensibly when given occasion-if not in this life (as for elect infants who die) then in the next. This does not mean, then, that salvation is "strictly a forensic transaction in heaven with no phenomenological effects." Quite the contrary, for Edwards. Saving dispositions will always eventually be exercised sensibly, but not always in this life with exercises that manifest explicit faith in Christ, as these four cases indicate. Or they might be exercised in this life but without knowing the name Jesus Christ-as Edwards said was the case for OT saints.

A third "abnormal" case is NT saints, such as Cornelius, who, according to Edwards, "did already in some respect believe in [Christ] even in the manner that the Old Testament saints were wont to do" (Miscellanies 40). That is, before he met Peter, Cornelius in some sense believed in a Christ of whom he had not yet heard. Edwards said the same about the apostles. Cornelius, Nathaniel, "probably" John's two disciples, and several others were good men before [they met Christ], for they seemed to be found already in a disposition to follow [Christ] when [Christ] first appeared to them in his human nature and this seems to have been the case with Zacchaeus and with the women of Canaan. (Miscellanies 847)

Edwards infers from this that "conversion may still be by divine constitution necessary to salvation in some respect even after [a person] is really a saint" (Miscellanies 847). Once again we see that Edwards is suggesting instances where a person can be regenerate before conversion to an explicit knowledge of Christ. At this point, probably mid- to late-1730s, Edwards was returning to an inference he had reached very early in his career (1723), that "a man may have the disposition in himself for some time before he can sensibly feel them [the exercises of that disposition], for want of occasion or other reason" (Miscellanies 276).

Gilbert's response to all this is that all of these NT saints eventually came to explicit faith in Christ. So they cannot "be said to have been saved without conscious faith.... not one of them failed to finally exercise the disposition in his heart." Yet Gilbert has already acknowledged that dispositions are exercised only "under normal circumstances." And Edwards makes clear that there are cases in which dispositions are not fully exercised by explicit knowledge of gospel doctrines. So the significance of these NT saints is not that they eventually professed faith in Christ but that Edwards says they were regenerated before they made that explicit profession.