JONATHAN EDWARDS'S END OF CREATION: AN EXPOSITION AND DEFENSE

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2006 by Schultz, Walter

I. INTRODUCTION

Jonathan Edwards's Dissertation Concerning the End for which God created the World1 is a treasure trove of resources and insights for contemporary philosophical theology-especially given his interest in resisting the erosion of the centrality of God in science, history, moral philosophy, and "true spirituality." His concerns were-and still are-legitimate. In this paper I make common cause with Edwards by defending his End of Creation against criticisms grounded in a recurrent strategic error in interpretation. I will examine three such critical works.2 William Wisner (1850) argues that Edwards's view of God and God's purpose in creation is inconsistent because God's making himself his end, as Edwards claims, entails both a deficiency in God and Neoplatonic emanationism, which contradict God's aseity and creation ex nihilo, respectively. Michael J. McClymond (1995) argues that Edwards's view of God as being normatively bound to regard each creature according to their inherent worth overrides God's freedom in creating and shows God to be inconsistent when he saves only the elect. James Beilby (2004) argues that Edwards's defense of his theses entails that God must demonstrate his glory. Since God's glory consists in the demonstration of attributes expressible only in creating, it follows that "to be who he is-He must create."3 Beilby then observes that this entailment is inconsistent with Edwards's commitment to God's aseity and freedom in creation. I defend Edwards against these charges by showing that each of these scholars commits a strategic error in interpretation. Each of these theorists, while apparently ignoring Edwards's own explicit claims that a complete and trustworthy account of God's end and motive in creation requires scriptural revelation, draws almost exclusively from the chapter that Edwards devotes to ascertaining what "reason teaches."4 But what reason teaches provides only the first part of Edwards's complete argument. Notice the difference between the claims: God's end in creation is X and Reason teaches that God's end in creation is X. Edwards should be understood to assert the latter. This is not to say that Edwards did not believe what he wrote about Reason's "dictates," but only to note that Edwards himself indicates that what Reason dictates on the matter is at best incomplete. Edwards deductively argues that we must suppose that a disposition in God moved him to create and that this disposition is related to God's value for himself. Wisner, McClymond, and Beilby ignore Edwards on this count and do not consider the completion of his argument which he gleans from a careful and exhaustive examination of scriptural teaching on the matter. Each theorist then claims to expose some inconsistency in Edwards's argument. Finally-and not coincidentally-Wisner and Beilby advocate positions which Edwards's End of Creation was designed to refute in the first place. In short, each of these works exemplifies a strategic error: failure to notice, reconstruct, and treat Edwards's argument in the first chapter as part of a rhetorical strategy pursued in the discourse of the age. This failure leads almost inexorably to systematic distortion of his particular claims.

I will argue two defensive theses. The first is that Edwards did not hold that God is normatively bound to value things according to their value. My second thesis is that Edwards's view of the inexhaustible fullness and selfsufficiency of God grounds Edwards's view of God's end and motive in creating the world, and therefore does not entail pantheism or Neoplatonic emanationism. To establish these two theses, I briefly describe two features of the intellectual milieu within which Edwards worked that have not been adequately acknowledged in Edwards scholarship. In section three, I offer a brief exposition of Edwards's argument in End of Creation, presenting evidence that, though Edwards was aware of the intellectual influences of his day, he was not taken in by them. In fact, he attempts to undermine their influence while working within the discourse shaped by their terms and concepts. In the fourth and final section of this paper, I discuss in detail the nature and genesis of these errors in Edwards scholarship.

II. TWO FEATURES OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Two features of the intellectual milieu within which Edwards found himself are crucial for understanding Edwards's point and strategy in End of Creation. The first is the widespread belief in the Euclidean Myth and the second is the equally widespread apparent compulsion to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma-or at least show how one's theory stands in relation to it. Consider the former first. Edwards worked within an intellectual climate characterized in part by a conviction that Euclid's geometry exemplified the ideal of systematic and certain knowledge. Esteem for the axiomatic method, and the power of reason in general, was unwavering and pervasive. As René Descartes (1596-1650) confesses,