Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

The East Windsor Parsonage: the Edwards and Stoddard Families

Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 at East Windsor, in the Connecticut Colony (now South Windsor)^[2]. He was the fifth of eleven children and the only son of the pastor Timothy Edwards, minister of East Windsor, and Esther Stoddard, daughter of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, pastor of Northampton since 1672 and the dominant figure of Reformed Protestantism in the Connecticut Valley^[3]. Growing up surrounded by ten sisters, in a parsonage where his father taught the children himself before they entered college, shaped a studious temperament and an early domestic piety: Timothy Edwards held, like most Puritan ministers of his generation, at least one enslaved person in his household, a Black man named Ansars^[4], a detail that recalls how domestic slavery, far from being an exception, ordinarily structured life in colonial New England parsonages, including the one in which the future theologian grew up.

The Young Naturalist: the "Flying Spider" Essay

Even before entering college, the boy showed an uncommon gift for natural observation. At about eleven years old, he wrote an essay, later reworked to resemble the scientific papers of his day under the title "The Flying Spider", describing precisely how spiders let themselves be carried by the wind at the end of a silk thread, a phenomenon naturalists would later call ballooning^[5]. This close attention to the regularities of the natural world foreshadows the philosopher who, later at Yale, would discover with fascination the work of John Locke and the physics of Newton, and who would never stop, throughout his life, reading the beauty of the created world as a language of divine glory.

Valedictorian of the Class of 1720

Edwards entered the Collegiate School of Connecticut, the institution that would become Yale College in 1718, in 1716, shortly before his thirteenth birthday^[6]. As early as 1717, he discovered John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, whose empiricism lastingly marked his theory of knowledge and his doctrine of the "sense of the heart"^[7]. Throughout his studies, he kept personal notebooks, Notes on the Mind, Notes on Natural Science, Notes on Scripture, in which he recorded his emerging philosophical reflections. He graduated in 1720 as valedictorian of his class^[8].

After two further years of theological study at Yale, he served for eight months, from August 1722 to April 1723, as a "supply pastor", an unordained stand-in minister, in a small Presbyterian congregation on William Street in New York^[9]. The congregation invited him to stay permanently; he declined. From 1724 to 1726, he became one of the two tutors responsible for directing Yale College in the absence of a rector^[10], a post that already testified, at his young age, to the intellectual reputation he had earned in the small theological world of New England.

Spiritual Crisis and the Personal Narrative

It was during these student years that Edwards went through the spiritual crisis he would recount much later, around 1740, in his posthumous autobiography known as the Personal Narrative. He first describes a childhood piety that was quite real but, in retrospect, lacking the "sweetness" proper to authentic grace:

"I used to pray five times a day in secret, and to spend much time in religious talk with other boys; and used to meet with them to pray together. [...] I, with some of my schoolmates joined together, and built a booth in a swamp, in a very retired spot, for a place of prayer." Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative, written around 1740^[11]

Edwards then recounts how, in childhood, he long stumbled over the central doctrine of Reformed Calvinism, the absolute sovereignty of God, who "elects" and "reprobates" according to his good pleasure alone:

"From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty [...]. I remember very well when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God [...]. There has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, in respect to the doctrine of God's sovereignty, from that day to this [...]. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God." Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative, written around 1740^[12]

The decisive turning point came in spring 1721, while reading a verse of the First Epistle to Timothy:

"As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before." Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative, on 1 Timothy 1:17^[13]

This "new sense", which Edwards would later call the sense of the heart, became the pivot of his whole religious epistemology: to know God by speculative reason alone, without this inward and "sweet" taste of his glory, is for him only a notional knowledge, external to the soul^[14]. It is this distinction between theoretical knowledge and immediate spiritual "sense" that would structure, fifteen years later, his whole theology of revival and his doctrine of the "religious affections".

Solomon Stoddard, the "Pope of the Connecticut Valley"

In 1726, the Congregationalist parish of Northampton called Edwards as assistant to his maternal grandfather, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, then over eighty years old and pastor of that parish since 1672^[15]. Stoddard's spiritual influence over the whole Connecticut Valley was such that posterity sometimes nicknamed him, with a touch of Puritan irony, the "Pope of the Connecticut Valley", a phrase signaling the informal but real authority this ecclesiastical patriarch exercised over the surrounding parishes. Edwards was ordained on 15 February 1727^[16]. Two years later, on Stoddard's death on 11 February 1729, Edwards found himself alone in charge of one of the largest and most prosperous parishes in the colony^[17].

Marriage to Sarah Pierpont

Also in 1727, Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, then seventeen years old, daughter of James Pierpont, one of the founders of Yale College, and descendant, through her mother, of the Puritan theologian Thomas Hooker^[18]. Edwards had noticed, a few years earlier, the early piety of the young girl when she was only thirteen^[19]. The couple would have eleven children, several of whose descendants became notable figures in American intellectual and political life, notably United States Vice President Aaron Burr (Edwards's grandson through his daughter Esther) and the educator Timothy Dwight, later president of Yale^[20].

A city transformed: the figures of a revival

Starting in 1733, an intense spiritual fervor spread through Northampton, reaching its peak during the winter of 1734 and the following spring. In the space of six months, nearly three hundred young people out of eleven hundred inhabitants of the town were admitted into the church^[21]. Edwards attributed this movement to a sermon preached in the autumn of 1734 on the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which he feared his young congregation treated as secondary^[22]. That same year, he published the sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, in which he defended the idea of an immediate supernatural illumination, given by the Spirit and not deducible from natural reason alone^[23], a direct doctrinal development of the experience of the "sense of the heart" he had himself undergone in 1721.

A Faithful Narrative (1737) and its transatlantic impact

Edwards recorded the events of this first revival in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, published in London in 1737 with a preface by the English Dissenting ministers Isaac Watts and John Guyse^[24]. The text, widely circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, became a literary model of the "revival narrative" genre and helped make Edwards known far beyond New England, a few years before the Great Awakening properly speaking swept through the British colonies in America^[25].

The shadow of the revival: the wave of suicides in the summer of 1735

Edwards's account does not conceal the dark side of this fervor. During the summer of 1735, part of the congregation sank into intense melancholy distress; "multitudes," in Edwards's own words, felt driven to take their own lives^[26]. At least two people committed suicide in this crisis, including a member of his own parish, his uncle by marriage Joseph Hawley II^[27]. This wave of despair brought the first period of revival to an end and taught Edwards a pastoral caution he would keep all his life: the extraordinary phenomena of an authentic revival can coexist with dangerous counterfeits of the spirit, a conviction that would nourish, five years later, his doctrine of the discernment of "religious affections."

George Whitefield at Northampton, October 1740

Around 1739-1740, the English itinerant preacher George Whitefield travelled through the Thirteen Colonies on a vast revival tour. When he preached at the Northampton church in October 1740, Edwards was so moved that he wept throughout the service, and much of his congregation was similarly overcome^[28]. This second blaze, which spread across the British colonies of North America, entered history under the name of the Great Awakening.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Enfield, 8 July 1741

It was in this context that Edwards delivered, on 8 July 1741 at Enfield (Connecticut), the sermon that would remain the most famous in all of North American religious history: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God^[29]. A striking and often overlooked fact: contrary to the image of a thundering preacher, contemporary accounts agree that Edwards did not shout or raise his voice, but spoke in a calm, almost monotonous and meditative tone^[30]. It was the text itself, not vocal theatrics, that produced on the Enfield assembly, which had not yet experienced the fervor of the revival sweeping neighboring towns, an effect of unheard-of intensity: cries, sobs, groans, worshippers clinging to the pews and pillars of the church for fear of physically sliding into hell^[31].

The sermon develops, in images of striking rhetorical power, the doctrine of the sinner's total dependence on divine pleasure alone:

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you." Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, 8 July 1741^[32]

"The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart." Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, 8 July 1741^[33]

"There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, 8 July 1741^[34]

The sermon ends, however, on an appeal, not on a merely terrifying statement:

"Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come." Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, 8 July 1741^[35]

This last line recalls what historiography too rarely notes: Edwards's sermon is not an exercise in gratuitous terror, but the pastoral application, in the service of an urgent call to conversion, of a doctrine of divine sovereignty which he held to be the highest truth a sinner could contemplate.

Discerning true from false: Distinguishing Marks and Religious Affections

The Great Awakening sparked intense controversies, even among ministers sympathetic to spiritual renewal: how to distinguish an authentic conversion from the spectacular physical phenomena, fainting, cries, convulsions, that sometimes accompanied preaching? In 1741, Edwards published The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, in which he defended the legitimacy of the revival against its rationalist critics while acknowledging that bodily manifestations, in themselves, neither prove nor disprove the presence of the Spirit^[36]. In 1742, he published Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, continuing this nuanced defense of the movement.

It is however in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), the fruit of a series of sermons preached in 1742-1743, that Edwards developed his most accomplished doctrine of spiritual discernment. Its central thesis can be summed up in a formula that became classic in Anglophone evangelical theology:

"True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections." Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Boston, 1746^[37]

By "affections," Edwards does not mean mere passing emotions, but "the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul"^[38], that is, the deep movements of the heart that effectively orient a person's thought, feeling, and action. The work then proposes twelve signs for distinguishing affections that are truly "gracious," supernatural in their origin, humble in their form, and fruitful in lasting practical fruits, from the purely natural or passing counterfeits that the revival had also brought to light^[39].

The absolute sovereignty of God and the attack on Arminianism

As early as 1731, ten years before the Great Awakening, Edwards had become known to the entire Reformed clergy of New England through a sermon delivered from the pulpit of Boston's Public Lecture on 8 July 1731: God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man's Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It^[40]. Against the "Arminian" tendencies, that is, tendencies attributing an active share in salvation to moral effort and human free choice, which were then gaining ground among part of Boston's Congregational clergy, Edwards states bluntly:

"God is glorified in the work of redemption in this, that there appears in it so absolute and universal a dependence of the redeemed on him [...]. The redeemed are in everything directly, immediately, and entirely dependent on God." Jonathan Edwards, God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, Boston, 8 July 1731^[41]

This absolute dependence, not only for justification but for every step of salvation, including final perseverance, is the thread running through all of Edwards's theology, and the point on which it most frontally opposes that of the Dutch theologian of the previous century Jacob Arminius (1560-1609), whose Remonstrant heirs had been condemned by the Synod of Dort more than a century earlier, but whose spirit continued, in Edwards's view, to insidiously corrupt the Anglo-American Reformed Protestantism of his day.

Freedom of the Will (1754): moral necessity against the freedom of indifference

Written in four and a half months during his missionary exile at Stockbridge and published in 1754, A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, known under the shortened title Freedom of the Will, is regarded by the American philosophical tradition as the most rigorously argued work of all colonial Reformed theology^[42]. In it Edwards carefully distinguishes two kinds of necessity:

"Moral necessity [...] is that necessity of connexion and consequence, which arises from such moral causes, as the strength of inclination, or motives, and the connexion which there is in many cases between these, and such certain volitions and actions." "By natural necessity, as applied to men, I mean such necessity as men are under through the force of natural causes; as distinguished from what are called moral causes, such as habits and dispositions of the heart, and moral motives and inducements." Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, Part I, Section IV, Boston, 1754^[43]

His central thesis is that the human will is always necessarily determined by "the strongest inclination" or the most powerful motive presenting itself to the mind, a necessity he calls moral rather than natural (a falling stone, a chained man), which allows him, in his own eyes, to preserve moral responsibility without resorting to the freedom of indifference, the capacity to choose without sufficient cause, defended by the Arminian theologians of his time. He illustrates with a now-famous image what he sees as the absurdity of a purely undetermined freedom:

"[If choices had no sufficient cause, they could make us no] better or worse, any more than a tree is better than other trees, because it oftener happens to be lit upon by a swan or nightingale." Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, Boston, 1754^[44]

The work directly targets the English and New English theologians Edwards considered heirs, consciously or not, of the Arminianism condemned at Dort, of which the Methodist theology of John Wesley, Edwards's exact contemporary (both men were born in the same year, 1703), was then the most influential and most openly avowed English version.

Original Sin (1758): the refutation of John Taylor

Completed on mission at Stockbridge and published posthumously in 1758, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended answers point by point the English Dissenter theologian John Taylor of Norwich (1694-1761), whose The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (1738) denied any hereditary transmission of Adam's guilt, on the principle that moral guilt can only be strictly personal^[45]. Edwards measured the scale of the threat Taylor's thesis posed, in his eyes, to the whole New England Reformed theological edifice:

"According to my observation, no one book has done so much towards rooting out of these western parts of New England, the principles and scheme of religion maintained by our pious and excellent forefathers [...], as that which Dr. Taylor has published against the doctrine of original sin." Jonathan Edwards, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, Boston, 1758^[46]

The work has three parts: the empirical and universal reality of sin (Edwards devotes long pages to observing human moral corruption, which he holds to be an ascertainable fact independently even of revelation); the nature of its transmission through the imputation of Adam's sin to all his posterity; and the particularly delicate question of God's ultimate responsibility for the existence of moral evil, which Edwards resolves through his broader doctrine of divine necessity and permission of sin in the service of a greater good^[47].

These great treatises, most of them written in the frugal conditions of the Stockbridge mission, mark nearly thirty years of uninterrupted theological output:

Metaphysics of glory: occasionalism, idealism and divine emanation

The two themes running through all of Edwards's work are, in the synthesis offered by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of his holiness^[49]. The first theme connects with a metaphysical doctrine of occasionalism: God alone is "the only real cause" and "the only true substance" of the universe; secondary causes, including the laws of nature, are only occasions on which God acts directly, much as he holds the universe in existence at each instant through a continuous act of re-creation^[50]. Influenced by Locke's empiricism and by an immaterialist idealism close to that of George Berkeley, Edwards also holds that material objects are, in the last analysis, only "collections of sensible ideas", whose stable and coherent reality comes only from God's constant will to produce regular perceptions in finite minds^[51].

In two treatises completed during his stay at Stockbridge and published posthumously in 1765, A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards develops a theology of glory as emanation:

"[It was God's last end that] there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fulness of good ad extra, or without himself; and that the disposition to communicate himself, or diffuse his own fulness, was what moved him to create the world." Jonathan Edwards, A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, published 1765^[52]

God therefore creates for his own glory, not out of need, but out of the sheer abundance of his perfection communicating itself and then "re-emanating" back toward him in the happiness of creatures, which is thus included in the ultimate end of creation rather than merely instrumentalized in its service^[53]. In The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards correspondingly defines authentic virtue as "consent of being to being"^[54], that is, a universal benevolence taking being in general as its object and, at its summit, God himself, as opposed to purely natural virtues (parental affection, pity, moral conscience) which remain, in his view, infinitely short of genuinely virtuous benevolence because they aim at particular persons rather than being in general^[55].

The Halfway Covenant and Stoddard's contested legacy

New England Congregational theology had, as early as 1657 and 1662, adopted what history calls the Halfway Covenant: baptism alone sufficed for admission into the church, but not for full communion, reserved for members who had testified to a recognizable conversion experience^[56]. Solomon Stoddard had gone further still, holding that the Lord's Supper itself could be a "converting ordinance", a means of grace open to all members "in covenant", converted or not, and that baptism gave sufficient title to all the privileges of the church^[57]. This practice, known as Stoddardeanism, had made Northampton one of the most open parishes in the region.

Edwards, as early as 1744, in the sermons that would become Religious Affections, lets his disagreement with this practice inherited from his own grandfather show through^[58]. That same year, an incident worsened tensions: Edwards publicly read out, at a church meeting, a list of young people suspected of reading improper books, an episode long reported as having indiscriminately mixed the accused with mere witnesses, but which more recent historical work (notably Patricia Tracy's) has nuanced by showing that the list did distinguish the two categories^[59].

The escalation and the June 1750 vote

From 1748 onward, Edwards came to argue publicly that the profession of faith required for admission to full communion had to involve genuinely saving faith, not doctrinal knowledge and morally honorable conduct alone^[60]. When a candidate for admission refused to submit to this strengthened requirement in 1748, the church backed the candidate against its pastor, and the break became inevitable^[61]. An ecclesiastical council voted, by a majority of ten votes to nine, to dissolve the pastoral bond; the church members ratified this decision by a vote of more than two hundred votes to twenty-three^[62], a proportion meaning barely a tenth of the congregation wanted to keep their pastor of twenty-three years.

The Farewell Sermon, 1 July 1750

On 1 July 1750, after twenty-three years of ministry, Edwards delivered in his Northampton church the Farewell Sermon, taking as his text 2 Corinthians 1:14, a passage on the pastor and his people meeting at last before Christ's tribunal^[68]. The sermon, still famous in Reformed homiletics for its dignity and restraint, opens on a meditation stripped of all bitterness:

"You and I are now parting one from another as to this world." Jonathan Edwards, A Farewell Sermon, Northampton, 1 July 1750^[69]

Edwards nevertheless continued to preach occasionally at Northampton until his effective departure for Stockbridge in the summer of 1751^[70].

A parish and a mission to the Housatonic Mohicans

Edwards declined the offer of a parish in Scotland to accept, after a three-month trial in the spring of 1751, the post of pastor and missionary at Stockbridge, on the Housatonic River (Massachusetts), succeeding the missionary John Sergeant, who had died prematurely^[71]. Founded in 1736 by the General Court of Massachusetts as a mixed town for Christianized Indians and white settlers, Stockbridge brought together mainly Mohicans (or Mahicans) from the Housatonic valley, later joined in the following years by Mohawk families^[72].

Edwards's ministry there unfolded on two fronts: he preached to the mission Indians through an interpreter, and defended their interests with a firmness that earned him lasting tensions with white settlers seeking to enrich themselves by abusing their official functions among the Indian community^[73]. These seven years, often presented by biographical tradition as a bitter exile after the Northampton disgrace, rank in reality among the most fruitful of his intellectual career.

A pen that never rested: the great treatises written on mission

Far from interrupting his theological work, it was precisely at Stockbridge that Edwards wrote, in frugal material conditions, his most important treatises: Freedom of the Will (completed and published in 1754), The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (completed shortly before his death, published in 1758), as well as the two posthumous dissertations Concerning the End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue^[74]. This missionary period, far from the learned circles of Boston, thus saw the birth of essentially what posterity would retain as his major philosophical contribution to Western thought.

A reluctant call

In 1757, the death of his son-in-law Aaron Burr Sr., husband of his daughter Esther and second president of the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton), left the presidency of the institution vacant^[75]. Edwards, who judged himself "in the decline of life" and was reluctant to leave his Stockbridge mission, nevertheless allowed himself to be persuaded to accept the office^[76]. He was installed as president on February 16, 1758^[77].

Smallpox inoculation and death, March 22, 1758

Almost immediately after his installation, Edwards was inoculated against smallpox, with the explicit intention of encouraging by his example the population of the college to protect itself against the epidemic then raging^[78]. His constitution, never very robust, did not withstand the inoculation: he died on March 22, 1758, aged fifty-four, barely thirty-four days after his installation^[79]. He left three sons and eight daughters^[80]. He is buried in Princeton Cemetery, where his grave remains visible today.

Encyclopedic honesty requires not passing over in silence a fact well attested by contemporary historiography, notably the work of the Princeton & Slavery Project and the Yale & Slavery Research Project: Jonathan Edwards was himself a slaveholder. In June 1731, he bought a Black teenage girl named Venus, then about fourteen years old, to whom he is thought, on the hypothesis of historian Kenneth Minkema, to have given the biblical name of Leah when a woman of that name became a full member of his church around 1736^[81]. He later acquired at least five other enslaved persons: Joab and Rose Binney, whom the records say he married in 1751, as well as Joseph and his companion, whose first name varies according to the sources (Sue or Lee); the inventory of his estate (1758) also lists a "Negro boy" named Titus, without establishing his parentage: some clues would make him the son of the Binneys, but a confusion of names makes it equally possible that he was the child of Joseph and his companion^[82].

In a pamphlet published in 1741, Edwards defended the institution of slavery for persons born enslaved in North America, debtors, or prisoners of war, while rejecting the Atlantic slave trade itself^[83], a distinction that contemporary historiography rightly judges morally untenable, but which reflected a position then widespread among the New England clergy of his time. Edwards did not live long enough to travel the road that some of his own disciples would walk after him: his son Jonathan Edwards Jr. and his protege Samuel Hopkins, applying to their ultimate consequences the ethical principles of their master, in particular his definition of virtue as "benevolence to being in general", became notable figures of the New England abolitionist movement of the next generation^[84]. This tension, between a theology of the dignity of the soul before God and a social practice of enslavement that nothing in that theology structurally prevented from being justified, remains one of the darkest and best documented pages of the Edwardsian biography.

Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards Jr. and the New Divinity

The direct disciples of Edwards, foremost among them Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and his own son Jonathan Edwards Jr., systematized and extended his work under the name of the New Divinity, then of New England theology, a current that structured a large part of American Reformed Protestantism until the mid-nineteenth century^[85].

An extraordinary family posterity

The descendants of Edwards and Sarah Pierpont gave the United States, according to the classic genealogical censuses, a remarkably disproportionate line of prominent figures: Vice President Aaron Burr, Yale president Timothy Dwight, but also, through more distant branches, First Lady Edith Roosevelt, writer O. Henry, publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday, and poet Robert Lowell^[86]. Nineteenth-century genealogists were able to count among Edwards's descendants several dozen university professors and more than ten presidents of institutions of higher learning^[87], a statistic often cited in American debates on intellectual heredity, although it evidently owes as much to the privileged social and educational access of this lineage as to any biological determinism.

Contemporary evangelical reception

Rediscovered in the twentieth century by historians such as Perry Miller, then by biographers such as George Marsden (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 2003), Edwards remains today a living reference for a large part of Anglophone Reformed evangelical Protestantism, notably in the United States, where pastors and authors such as John Piper helped popularize his theology of divine sovereignty and joy in God among a contemporary evangelical readership far wider than the scholarly circle of colonial New England specialists.

What a Catholic can recognize: the sense of transcendence and grace

A Catholic reader can recognize in Edwards's work a sound and profound intuition: the refusal to reduce God to a mere cause among others, a keen sense of the creature's radical dependence on its Creator, and an insistence, against all superficial moralism, on what Catholic theology itself calls the absolute necessity of actual grace for every salutary act, a position the Second Council of Orange (529) had already defined against Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, long before the Protestant Reformation made it, in its own way, one of its founding articles. His doctrine of the "beauty" of divine holiness, of glory as generous emanation, and of virtue as "consent of being to being" recovers, by properly Puritan paths, something of the Augustinian and Thomist intuition that God creates not from necessity but from the sheer superabundance of his goodness, the bonum diffusivum sui of the scholastic tradition.

What divides: moral necessity, predestination and the absence of sacraments

These real convergences must not, however, mask what decisively separates Edwardsian theology from Catholic doctrine:

• His doctrine of the moral necessity of the will, developed in Freedom of the Will, results in a thoroughgoing theological determinism: every act of the will, including the first assent to grace, is necessarily determined by the strongest inclination, itself ultimately decreed by God. The Council of Trent, in the fourth canon (DH 1554) of its decree on justification, explicitly condemns anyone who would affirm that man cooperates in no way, in a purely passive manner, in his own justification^[88], a canon that targets precisely the kind of necessity Edwards defends with the greatest philosophical rigor of all colonial Protestant theology.
• His predestination remains, like that of John Calvin from whom he inherits it directly through the Westminster Confession, a double predestination: God does not merely permit the reprobation of the damned in response to their free refusal of grace (the Thomist position of the Summa theologiae, First Part, question 23), but positively decrees it from all eternity, in the same way as the election of the saved, a position the seventeenth canon (DH 1567) of the same decree explicitly condemns^[89].
• Edwards restored neither the seven Catholic sacraments, nor ministerial priestly mediation, nor the living magisterium of the Church as the authentic interpreter of Scripture: his theology remains fully inscribed within the framework of sola scriptura and the Protestant Reformation, whose Congregationalist ecclesiology he shares, each local church governed by its own assembly of the faithful alone, without apostolic episcopal succession.
• His occasionalist metaphysics, which makes God the "only real cause" of every effect in the universe, tends to absorb created secondary causes into divine causality alone, to the point of weakening the classic Catholic doctrine of the instrumental causality of creatures, that Thomist conviction that God the first mover acts truly through the secondary causes he himself endowed with a causality of their own, without reducing them to mere occasions.

The following table situates Edwards's position between that of his Dutch theological adversary and the Catholic doctrine defined at Trent, on the precise question of the will, grace, and perseverance:

A theological determinism more radical than John Calvin's

It is striking that Edwards, by philosophically systematizing the Reformed doctrine of necessity, arrives at a position more radical still than Calvin's own: where the Institutes of the Christian Religion argues essentially from scriptural exegesis, Freedom of the Will grounds theological determinism in a conceptual apparatus borrowed from modern philosophy, Lockean empiricism and the critique of causality, to show that freedom of indifference is not only contrary to Scripture but rationally incoherent in itself. It is precisely this contrast, between a Calvin who argues as a biblical theologian and an Edwards who argues as a philosopher of the Enlightenment turned against the Enlightenment, that earns the latter, in the eyes of even secular historians of American philosophy, the title of the greatest metaphysician produced by North American colonial Protestantism, a title that takes nothing away, from the Catholic point of view, from the gravity of the doctrinal dead end toward which this philosophical rigor itself leads.

• John Calvin (1509-1564): the Genevan reformer whose double predestination, radicalized by Edwards, traces directly back to the Institutio christianae religionis.
• Jacob Arminius (1560-1609): the Dutch theologian whose Remonstrant heirs were the constant target of Edwardsian polemics against Arminianism.
• John Wesley (1703-1791): born the same year as Edwards, but leading the English Evangelical Revival toward a diametrically opposed Arminian theology.
• Charles Wesley (1707-1788): hymn writer of the same eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival, on the English Methodist side.
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563): the Catholic doctrinal response on grace, justification, and cooperating free will.
• Calvinist predestination: a detailed analysis of the double predestination Edwards inherited and pushed to its ultimate philosophical consequences.
• Sola scriptura: the formal Protestant principle Edwards never called into question.
• The Protestant Reformation: an overview of the movement of which New England theology is a late colonial branch.
• Responses to Protestantism: a Catholic apologetic synthesis addressing the five solae of the Reformation.