Why is jonathan edwards important

Learn More Websites Yale University. Yale University. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth. Jonathan Edwards, ; a Biography. Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Such were the fruits of his lifelong habit of rising at a. The College of New Jersey later Princeton called him as president in But soon after his arrival, Edwards died of the new smallpox vaccination.

He was He left no small legacy: Edwards is considered some would say with Reinhold Niebuhr America's greatest theologian. Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives.

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Tags: Jonathan Edwards Preaching Theologians. God's ultimate aim in all his works must therefore be himself. Edwards concludes that he creates the world for his own glory. End of Creation reconciles these claims. In pursuing his own glory, God thus takes both himself and the creature's good as ultimate aims.

Happiness consists in the knowledge and love of God, and joy in him. An apparent consequence is that God must create a world to display his glory. Whether Edwards was aware of these consequences is uncertain. The two most common objections to them, however, — that they imply that there isn't any real contingency and that God isn't free — would not have troubled him. For Edwards thought that our world displays neither contra-causal freedom nor real indeterminacy.

He also believed that moral agency and freedom are compatible with metaphysical necessity. Edwards believes that this is the only kind of freedom that is either relevant to moral agency or worth having. True virtue aims at the good of being in general and therefore also prizes the disposition that promotes it.

Truly virtuous people thus love two things — being and benevolence. One of the principal concerns of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, et al. Edwards' attitude toward these attempts is ambivalent. On the one hand, he denies that the truly benevolent are motivated by self-love.

On the other, Edwards argues against, e. Conscience, for instance, is the product of a power of placing ourselves in the situation of others which is needed for any sort of mutual understanding , a sense of the natural fitness of certain responses injury and punishment or disapproval, benefit and reward or approval , and self-love.

Placing ourselves in the situation of those we have injured, we recognize that being treated in that way would not merely anger us but seem unfitting or undeserved, and that we are therefore inconsistent in approving of our treating others in ways we would not wish to be treated ourselves. Edwards is inclined to think that all except pity are forms of self-love.

The important point, however, is that even if they aren't, actions motivated by them aren't truly virtuous. To see why consider pity.

Now pity is directed to those in extreme distress whose suffering appears undeserved or excessive. Its object is therefore restricted to only part of being in general. Pity, for example, may motivate a judge to act unjustly.

We should not conclude that pity or other instinctual affections, or even rational self-love, are bad. Edwards point like Kant's is merely that their goodness isn't a truly moral goodness.

The implication is nonetheless clear. Natural virtues are either tainted with self-love or fail to extend to being in general. They are therefore counterfeits or simulacra of true virtue. Edwards concludes that true virtue is a supernatural gift. Love's scope can be narrower or wider, however. Only true benevolence, therefore, is truly beautiful.

Since God's benevolence alone is perfect, he is the only thing that is truly beautiful without qualification. The fitness of God's dispensations, the harmony of his providential design, and so on, also exhibit the highest degree of secondary beauty.

The saints alone, however, can discern true beauty. Because their hearts have been regenerated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the saints love being in general. At other times he identifies it with the consent of being to being, i. His view appears to be this. True beauty is identical with benevolence or agreement in somewhat the same way in which water is identical with H 2 O or heat with molecular motion.

But benevolence is also the objective basis of a dispositional property, namely, a tendency to produce a new simple idea in the savingly converted. Edwards' account of true beauty thus resembles some accounts of color or extension. Spiritual delight is a simple idea or sensation like our ideas of color or extension.

The dispositional property is a power objects have to produce these ideas in our understandings. Benevolence is the objective configuration underlying this power and corresponds to the microstructure of bodies that underlie their tendency to excite ideas of color or extension in minds like ours.

For example, a conviction of Christ's sufficiency as a mediator depends on an apprehension of his beauty and excellency. The new sense also helps us grasp the truth of the gospel scheme as a whole. Edwards' defense of the objectivity of the new spiritual sense has four steps.

The world is an interconnected system of minds and ideas in which the only true substance and cause is an infinite and omnipotent love. Human benevolence is thus an appropriate or fitting response to reality. Since benevolence is an appropriate response to reality, so too is benevolence's delight in benevolence. There is also an implicit theological defense of the spiritual sense's objectivity. There were Puritan precedents for these claims.

Edwards is making two claims. First, the new spiritual disposition and tastes which God bestows on the soul are divine. The differences between God's love and joy and the love and joy that he bestows on his saints is a difference of degree, not of nature or kind. Hence, since God in some sense is reality or being itself, it follows that the spiritual sense is necessarily aligned with reality.

Edwards thinks that reason can prove that God exists, establish many of his attributes, discern our obligations to him, and mount a probable case for the credibility of scripture. His view is briefly this. Since accurate reasoning about a subject matter requires attending to actual ideas of it, one can't accurately reason about religion if one lacks the relevant actual ideas.

To have an actual idea of God, for example, one must have actual ideas of the ideas that compose it. But most of us don't. Those parts of the idea of God that everyone has ideas of knowledge, power, and justice, for instance either aren't attended to or, if they are, fail to elicit the appropriate affective reaction. In addition, we can't fully understand ideas of affections which we haven't experienced and so can't properly understand God's benevolence if we aren't benevolent ourselves.

And without the simple idea of true beauty, one can understand neither God's holiness nor the facts that depend on it. True benevolence remedies these deficiencies. Because the desires of the truly benevolent are properly ordered, they attend to ideas of religion and are suitably affected by the ideas of God's attributes and activities that everyone has. They fear his wrath, for example, and are grateful for his benefits.

Furthermore, they understand God's benevolence because their own benevolence mirrors it. Finally, the truly benevolent delight in the benevolence in which holiness consists, i. Edwards' claim, then, is that to reason accurately about God one must have an actual idea of him, and to have that one must be truly benevolent.

Right reasoning about religious matters requires right affections. Edwards is an evidentialist. Rational religious beliefs are either properly basic or rest on good evidence. A belief that the gospel scheme exhibits true beauty is an example of the former. But most religious beliefs depend on evidence. Sometimes this evidence includes the idea of true beauty.

Even when it does not, however, the right affections are needed to appreciate its force. In either case, only those with properly disposed hearts can read the evidence correctly. The trustees of the College of New Jersey invited Edwards to become its third president in