Abstract
Reformed theology is often thought to be antipathetic to virtue theory. However, Jonathan Edwards is a counterexample to this way of thinking. In this article, I offer an account of Edwards’s moral thought as a case study of Reformed theology that is also a species of virtue theory, focusing on what he says about the formation of character. I argue that key doctrinal commitments drive his moral theology, and generate some interesting problems for his ethics. Although his work is not without shortcomings, Edwards is a thinker whose moral theology might be usefully repaired and retrieved by contemporary theologians in the Reformed tradition for whom ‘duties are founded on doctrines’.
Introduction
Traditionally, Reformed theologians have had a rather gloomy view of human character. Theological anthropology in the Reformed tradition is usually associated with the notion of ‘total depravity’. On this way of thinking, human beings are corrupt as a consequence of original sin, and morally vitiated. The idea is not that fallen humans are incapable of doing any good actions, or even that all the actions they do perform are totally depraved, but rather that all their moral actions are tainted by the effects of sin. 1
Alongside this rather pessimistic view of the moral nature of fallen human beings there is a suspicion (amongst some notable modern Reformed thinkers at least) of the virtue tradition in Christian ethics. As Kirk Nolan puts it, ‘While there have been periods in which Reformed conceptions of virtue were articulated, the impact of those periods goes largely unnoticed in today’s Reformed churches’. This is all the more notable ‘given the fact that an account of virtue may be found in the works of some of its most prominent thinkers’. 2 Reformed moral thought is usually associated with the ethics of divine commands, situated in the context of covenantal theology, and law, rather than with the emphasis on the development of habit through practice characteristic of the virtue tradition. 3 In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle maintained that ‘[t]he virtues, then, come neither by nature nor against nature, but nature gives the capacity for acquiring them, and this is developed by training’. 4 To some Reformed thinkers this Aristotelian emphasis on habituation in order to develop the virtues undermines the claim that fallen human beings are incapable of pleasing God without divine grace, as well as the notion that the moral character of human beings must be renewed by means of divine grace in order to live the good life. 5
These two issues, namely, the ‘pessimism’ of Reformed theological anthropology, as well as the (modern) Reformed suspicion of virtue ethics as a way of conceiving moral theology, have a direct bearing upon Reformed notions of character. Rather than trying to survey representative accounts of Reformed views on human character as a way of pursuing this line of inquiry further, in this article I propose to focus on what I take to be arguably the most sophisticated, and certainly one of the most influential, accounts of moral character in the Reformed tradition as a case study. This is the position developed by Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards is salient for two reasons, corresponding to the two issues with which we began. He wrote one of the most thorough and influential treatments of original sin in the Reformed tradition, which elaborates upon the doctrine of total depravity that can be found in the work of Magisterial Reformers like Calvin. 6 He was also a theologian enamored of a version of virtue theory in moral theology. In fact, his account of virtue presents an understanding of human character that reflects important elements of Reformed thought, whilst innovating within the tradition. He is therefore an important test case of how Reformed theologians might engage with notions of virtue and character today.
His Reformed-theological sensibilities are also evident in his characteristically doctrinal approach to ethics. In contemporary treatments of Edwards’s moral thought he is sometimes presented as if he is merely another eighteenth century moral sense theorist like Francis Hutcheson. But as Stephen Wilson observes, although he was ‘certainly influenced by moral sense theory’ he was ‘far from the more or less Anglican position attributed to him by some ethicists’. 7 In fact, by Edwards’s own estimate doctrinal theology funds moral rumination. ‘Duties are founded on doctrines’, he writes, ‘and the revelation we now have of the Trinity, of the love of God, of the love of Christ to sinners, of his humiliation’ and of other Christian doctrines ‘make a vast alteration with respect to the reason and obligations to many amiable and exalted duties, so that they are as it were new’. 8 Attending to this doctrinal foundation makes an important difference to how we understand Edwards’s views on the related issues of virtue and character, as we shall see. 9
We proceed as follows. First, I shall give an overview of some of the main doctrinal themes that bear upon Edwards’s moral thought. Then, in a second section, I address some problems that these themes raise for his account of virtue and character. A closing section offers some reflections on the prospects for retrieving a broadly Edwardsian approach to virtue and character as a resource for contemporary Reformed moral theology.
Doctrinal Themes in Edwards’s Moral Theology
After a period in which the study of Edwards’s moral theology languished, there have been a number of treatments of this aspect of his writings. 10 His most important work in this regard is his dissertation on The Nature of True Virtue. 11 However, as recent studies of his thought have emphasized, it is a mistake to attempt to treat this work, or his moral theology more generally, in isolation from his wider corpus. His understanding of human beings and their relationship to God as creator and sustainer, and as the divine Trinity, have an important bearing on the shape of his ethics. 12 With that in mind, in what follows we shall focus on four key theological themes in Edwards’s moral thought. These are: his view of God’s relation to creation; his understanding of human beings in a state of sin; his account of infused habits; and his situating of his account of true virtue in the broader context of the participation of human beings in the life of God.
God and Creation
Like many Reformed theologians, divine sovereignty played an organizing role in Edwards’s thought. He believed that the creation is the emanation of the divine life.
13
God ‘communicates’ himself in creation, as Edwards puts it, in the ‘overflow’ of his own divine fulness. He is the one truly excellent being, the uncreated spirit upon whom all created spirits immediately depend for their continued existence moment-to-moment. Excellency, in this connection, is a semi-technical term that has to do with beauty and symmetry (an aesthetic dimension); agreement, consent and equality between the parts of a thing and the whole thing (a relational component); and the being of a thing (an ontological component).
14
It is a quality that, on Edwards’s reckoning, implies plurality for, as he says in discussing excellency in his early philosophical notes, ‘one alone … cannot be excellent’.
15
This divine excellency is expressed in God’s triune life so that Edwards can say: As to God’s Excellence, it is evident it consists in the Love of himself … he exerts himself towards himself, no other way, than in infinitely loving and delighting in himself; in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. This makes the Third, the Personal Holy Spirit, of the Holiness of God, which is his infinite Beauty; and this is God’s Infinite Consent to Being in general. And his love to the creature is his excellence, of the communication of Himself, his complacency in them, according as they partake of more or less of Excellence and beauty, that is, of holiness (which consists in love); that is, according as he communicates more or less of his Holy Spirit.
16
The Holy Spirit is particularly associated in Edwards’s thought with God’s love, and with the communication of God’s being in creation. What is more, ‘’Tis peculiar to God, that he has beauty within himself, consisting in Being’s consenting with his own Being, or the love of himself, in his own Holy Spirit. Whereas the excellence of others is in loving others, in loving God, and in the communications of his Spirit’. 17 The beauty or excellence of creatures, including the beauty or excellence of virtue communicated by God, is a reflection of this maximal divine beauty or excellency, and creatures instantiate these qualities as a reflection of the effulgence of the divine nature as the fountain or spring from which created ‘being’ emanates. 18 Edwards also thinks that excellence or beauty is primarily a mental quality: ‘it is a beauty that has its original seat in the mind’. 19 It is ‘the beauty of those qualities and acts of the mind that are of a moral nature’, 20 and therefore consistent with the ascription of praise and blame. Nevertheless, in order to ‘relish’ this beauty (as Edwards puts it), the creature must be given the right temper 21 —and in fallen human beings that comes only through the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit. For it requires a ‘union of heart’ with God 22 that is impossible without divine grace.
Human Beings in a State of Sin
Edwards affirms the common Reformed view of total depravity. Calvin defined original sin as ‘a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to all the parts of the soul, which first makes us obnoxious to the wrath of God, and then produces in us works which in Scripture are termed works of the flesh’. 23 Edwards’s language is similar: ‘By original sin … is meant the innate sinful depravity of the heart’ although he admits that in his own time it is ‘vulgarly understood’ to include ‘not only the depravity of nature, but the imputation of Adam’s first sin’ thereby extending the definition to include the transmission of original sin as well. 24
In his treatise on Original Sin, he goes to great lengths to explain how fallen human beings can be responsible for the morally vitiated state of sin that is ascribed to them by God. He compresses much of the complexity of Original Sin in the seventh sermon in his Charity and its Fruits series, which is an important source for his moral thought. There Edwards emphasizes the way in which the fall of humanity entailed the loss of the nobler principles organizing human moral nature, which were dependent upon the immediate agency of the Holy Spirit. Without the presence of these higher principles, human beings became morally disordered, being governed by the ‘lower principles’ stemming from self-interest. Thus: The ruin which the Fall brought upon the soul of man consists very much in that he lost his nobler and more extensive principles, and fell wholly under the government of self-love. He is debased in his nature and become little and ignoble … as soon as he had transgressed, those nobler principles were immediately lost and all this excellent enlargedness of his soul was gone and he thenceforward shrunk into a little point, circumscribed and closely shut up within itself to the exclusion of others. God was forsaken and fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired within himself and became wholly governed by narrow, selfish principles. Self-love became absolute master of his soul, the more noble and spiritual principles having taken warning and fled.
25
The moral disorder of human beings consequent upon the primal sin entailed a corruption of nature. Thereafter, human beings were bound to sin. This is the moral corruption of original sin. To it was added original guilt, that is, the guilt of our first parents transmitted to their progeny. Edwards spent some time trying to rebut objections to the notions of transmitted sin and guilt (which need not concern us here). He also attempted to give some account of the moral psychology of those in a state of sin (which does concern us). Like the Amryaldian theologians of the French Reformed Seminary at Saumur, he maintained that fallen human beings are naturally able to choose to love God, but have a ‘moral inability’ to do so. 26 This moral inability he understands as equivalent to lacking a moral inclination to will to will the good with respect to pleasing God consequent upon original sin, though there is no natural impediment (no physical defect or obstacle) preventing fallen humans from willing the good.
The upshot of this is that human beings are quite incapable of pleasing God or displaying true virtue without some act of grace. According to Edwards, there are no circumstances in which a fallen human being would ever be able to will to will what is pleasing in the sight of God. Without the reparative work of the Holy Spirit indwelling the believer in regeneration, and bringing about the re-ordering of human moral nature so that the inferior principles became organized once more by the superior principles of piety and holiness provided by the Holy Spirit—as it was prior to the Fall—human beings will never please God. Edwards is clear that moral bootstrapping from a state of sin into a state of grace, Pelagian-style, is theologically untenable.
Infused Habits
An oft-repeated criticism of Edwards’s understanding of infused grace is that it sounds more Catholic than Protestant. 27 For, as Paul Ramsey points out, Edwards clearly teaches ‘a doctrine of infused righteousness’, that is, of the infusion of Christ’s righteousness via the Holy Spirit, ‘and not only a doctrine of Christ’s righteousness imputed to us’. 28 It was for this reason that Tryon Edwards edited out language of infusion in his nineteenth edition of Charity and its Fruits. However, Edwards’s understanding of infused grace, and infused habits, are in fact variations on a Reformed theme.
Edwards maintained that in regeneration the human soul is infused with the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that indwelt human beings before the Fall, and had organized the lower principles of human nature before Adam’s primal sin in a way that formed them according to the design plan of being able to participate in communion with God. 29 This infusion of divine grace in fallen human beings is not distinct from the divine nature; it is the infusion of the divine nature into the soul, the ‘communication’ of the Holy Spirit to the regenerate. This is what Edwards calls the ‘new sense of things’, and it is a radical reorientation of fallen human beings so that they may begin to please God and display true virtue. 30 In keeping with his Reformed forebears, Edwards believes that without the infusion of the grace that is the Holy Spirit human beings cannot please God. Nor can they hope to display true virtue. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul enables fallen human beings to begin a journey ‘into’ God, as it were, for in indwelling them he confers upon them his nature (but not his essence—in keeping with other traditional views about human participation in the divine life commensurate with theosis). 31 The Spirit provides human beings with the ‘spiritual image of God’. As a corollary to this, Edwards reasons that one cannot attain true virtue merely by habituation. He writes, ‘To say that a man who has no true virtue and no true grace can acquire it by frequent exercises of [it], is as much a contradiction as to say a man acts grace [sic] when he has no grace, or that he has it [when] he has it not’. 32 Virtue, and the habits of true virtue, are, as Elizabeth Cochran has recently pointed out, received from God on Edwards’s view. ‘Yet our reception is not passive’, she writes. ‘For Edwards we actively participate in the virtue we receive; this participation makes our moral agency authentic’. 33
Philip Quinn criticizes Edwards on this very point. He thinks that ‘it does not seem impossible for us to have a loving attitude toward all existing things without a special gift of regenerating grace’. He goes on to ask, ‘why should we think that anything more than … a mechanism of natural affinity built into human psychology is needed in order to account of the virtuous love of virtue?’ 34 But for a Reformed theologian like Edwards, original sin poses an insuperable obstacle to a truly virtuous love of virtue—absent divine grace. The moral inability of which Edwards speaks in Freedom of the Will 35 renders human beings disordered and incapable of acting in a manner pleasing to God. But the infusion of grace enables regenerate humans to exemplify true virtue, from a virtuous disposition brought about through the direct work of the Spirit upon the soul in moral revivification.
We might put it like this. For Edwards, true virtue requires a love of God such that without this love no virtuous disposition may be formed. Yet such a disposition is entirely lacking in fallen human beings. Thus in The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards can write ‘no affection whatsoever to any creature, or any system of created beings, which is not dependent on, nor subordinate to a propensity or union of the heart to God, the Supreme and Infinite Being, can be of the nature of true virtue’. 36 Earlier remarks in his ‘Miscellanies’ notebook underline the point: ‘the habit of grace … is always begun with an act of grace that shall imply faith in it, because a habit can be of no manner of use till there is occasion to exert it; and all habits being only a law that God has fixed, that such actions upon such occasions should be exerted, the first new thing that there can be in the creature must be some actual alteration’. 37 Therefore the habit of grace requires a prior act of grace by means of which the human soul is regenerated, whereupon virtuous habits, understood as moral laws that God has ‘fixed’, may be instantiated and developed. 38
The End for which God Created Human Beings
It has sometimes been asserted that the rejection of a broadly Aristotelian scheme of moral theory in the wake of the Protestant Reformation has led to the evisceration of teleology or, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, ‘man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos’. 39 In its theological guise the worry can be put like this: the voluntarism underpinning divine commands tends to deprive moral theology of any sense of a goal or moral end beyond that of obedience to the divine will. According to MacIntyre’s understanding of early modern moral thought, ‘the moral scheme which forms the historical background … had … a structure which requires three elements: untutored human nature, man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos and the moral precepts which enable him to pass from one state to the other’. 40 Eighteenth-century moral philosophers excised the teleological element of moral inquiry, which left untutored human nature and moral precepts to hold human nature in check—precepts that made no allowance for a purpose or goal achieved through habituating the virtues in human nature. The moral goal present in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, appropriated by his Christian heirs, was reduced in post-Reformation moral theology to the need to adhere to divine commands. 41
However recent work on the notion of union with Christ and participation in the divine life in Reformed theology has shown that this MacIntyrian narrative regarding Reformation theology, and of Reformed theology in particular, is wide of the mark. To take just one example, in the very opening passage of the Institutes where Calvin sets out his understanding of human corruption, he also makes clear that we should find virtue in God: So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods. But should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to which, as a standard, we are bound to be conformed, what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence. So far are those qualities in us, which seem most perfect, from corresponding to the divine purity.
42
In this passage the goal of human moral development is not made entirely clear. Recognition that God’s virtue infinitely outstrips the dim reflection of this in human virtue provides no tangible account of what it is that fallen human beings should be aiming at, or whither they are bound. This Calvin provides elsewhere, explaining that participation on the divine life is the goal at which we should aim.
43
For example, This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, becoming Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, by accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty into himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness.
44
This is indicative of the way in which Calvin’s theology makes it plain that union with Christ, and participation in the divine life, are the goals of a transformed human life. Far from eviscerating moral teleology he relocates it—as a goal of the Christian life understood in terms of the language of union and participation.
Although Jonathan Edwards was at pains to distance himself from being called a ‘Calvinist’ for anything more than convention’s sake, and like many puritans claimed no dependence on the thought of Calvin in particular, 45 it is notable that his moral theology shares several distinctive features that are characteristic of Calvin’s thought as well—and that may fairly be called ‘Calvinistic’. These include a doctrine of total depravity (which, we have noted, he parsed somewhat differently than Calvin), a concern for locating virtue in the Godhead, and only derivatively in human beings with whom he is united (Cochran’s ‘receptive human virtues’), and, related to this, a clear teleological focus in his moral theology.
Perhaps even more than Calvin, Edwards regarded the goal of the moral life as being aimed at participation in the life of God. He certainly wrote about it with great enthusiasm and precision, especially in The End for which God Created the World. The reason for being holy, and developing a moral character is, in Edwards’s estimation, in order to be united with God in ‘an infinite strictness’, although there will never come a time at which ‘this infinitely valuable good [that is, complete union with God] has been actually bestowed’. 46 Like a mathematical asymptote, the believer is on a journey towards God, so to speak, which goes on forevermore, but which never leads to the loss of the human individual in the divine, like a drop of water in the ocean. Their earthly pilgrimage is only the beginning of a life directed towards ever closer union with God that continues everlastingly. The development of true virtue is directed towards this end. Edwards is unabashed about this. What is more, and with a nod to The End for which God Created the World, he writes in True Virtue of the way in which this goal of union is subordinate to the more ultimate goal of glorifying God. He writes, ‘[t]hough we are not able to give anything to God, which we have of our own, independently; yet we may be the instruments of promoting his glory, in which he takes a true and proper delight’. 47 Rather than feeling any embarrassment about instrumentalizing human beings in the purposes of God, Edwards revels in it in good Reformed fashion: our end, or goal, is to glorify God and delight in him.
The beauty or excellency that is true virtue is, according to Edwards, benevolence to Being in general, a ‘consent, propensity, and union of heart with Being in general’. In Edwards’s nomenclature, benevolence to ‘Being in general’ has to do with all existing beings. This, he thinks, must go hand in hand with ‘a supreme love to God’ as the ‘foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty’. 48 In a similar manner, in the first sermon in the Charity and its Fruits series Edwards avers, ‘[a]ll that virtue which is saving, and distinguishing of true Christians from others, is summed up in Christian or divine love’. 49 Like Augustine, Edwards regards love to God and to all existing beings, as the heart of true virtue. In the twelfth sermon of the series he reasons that all the virtues are concatenated together, and imply one another, because they are communicated together by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit in the human soul in the work of regeneration. 50
The communal dimension to true virtue is spelt out in his final sermon in his Charity and its Fruits series, where he lays out his conception of heaven as a world of love. He writes that the heavenly society shall all be united together in a very near relation. Love seeks a near relation to the object beloved. And in heaven all shall be nearly related. They shall be nearly allied to God, the supreme object of their love … all shall be nearly related to Christ; for he shall be the Head of the whole society, and husband of the whole church of saints. All together shall constitute his spouse, and they shall be related one to another as brethren. It will all be one society, yea, one family.
51
The desire for union and participation in the divine life characteristic of Edwards’s eschatology is here clearly evident. Beauty or excellency displayed in the creature is a reflection of the beauty and excellency of God, and finds its apogee in union with the divine in the heavenly society, bringing together the love to being in general and to God in particular that Edwards maintains is at the heart of true virtue, in a society that is everlasting and progressive in its increasing intimacy and union.
If we compare Edwards’s views in The End for which God Created the World, we find him expounding this progressive eschatological state of union in more detail. He writes, ‘But if strictness of union to God be viewed as thus infinitely exalted; then the creature must be regarded as infinitely, nearly and closely united to God’.
52
What is more, If by reason of the strictness of the union of a man and his family, their interest may be looked upon as one, how much more one is the interest of Christ and his church (whose first union in heaven is unspeakably more perfect and exalted, than that of an earthly father and his family), if they be considered with regard to their eternal and increasing union!
53
Against the objection that the progressive state of increasing union between the believer and God here conceived will never yield complete union, Edwards remarks, I suppose it will not be denied by any that God, in glorifying the saints in heaven with eternal felicity, aims to satisfy his infinite grace or benevolence, by the bestowment of a good infinitely valuable, because eternal: and yet there never will come the moment, when it can be said, that now this infinitely valuable good has been actually bestowed.
54
Asymptotic indeed!
Some Problems for Edwards’s Moral Theology
We come to objections to the Reformed-theological cast of Edwards’s ethics. Perhaps the most serious problems have to do with questions of creaturely moral agency. Let us focus on four of the most significant.
The Problem of Occasionalism
The first two problems, though metaphysical in nature, have a direct bearing upon his moral thought. They are also closely related and sometimes conflated in the literature dealing with Edwards’s thought. Occasionalism is the doctrine according to which God is the sole cause of all that comes to pass. Creatures are merely the ‘occasions’ of divine action. So, if Jones chooses to raise her arm, her volition, her intentional action, and the visible physical act of raising her arm are all caused by God on this view. Her volition, and intentional act, as well as the physical movement of her arm are not actions she causes; she is merely the occasion of God causing them.
Edwards clearly endorses the doctrine of occasionalism in his writings. 55 But this has an immediate moral implication: how can the formation of any virtuous disposition, or intention, or volition, be truly that of the creaturely agent if God is the cause of all that comes to pass? I have written on this matter at length elsewhere. 56 For present purposes I shall say this. Edwards’s doctrine of occasionalism does not necessarily undermine the claim that I am the one who forms the intention and wills a particular thing to obtain. I don’t cause these things, that much is true on his view. But I am the entity that brings them about, and I am the entity that identifies with these actions as mine; God does not. For at least some action theorists this may be sufficient for agency, even if it is a very thin account of agency. 57 Nor is it inconsistent with his claims about true virtue, because virtues are received as a divine gift in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and cultivated in conjunction with the Spirit’s internal work of sanctification. Odd though it may look to modern eyes, Edwards’s position in this respect is consistent. 58
The Problem of Continuous Creation
The second and related problem has to do with Edwards’s doctrine of continuous creation. According to Edwards, in considering the metaphysics of creation much depends on the degree to which ‘created identity or oneness with past existence, in general, depends on the sovereign constitution and law of the Supreme Author and Disposer of the universe’. 59 He thinks that ‘the communication or continuance of the same consciousness and memory to any subject, through successive parts of duration, depends wholly on a divine establishment’. 60 Moreover, ‘the existence of created substances, in each successive moment, must be the effect of the immediate agency, will, and power of God’. 61 In fact, ‘God’s upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing, at each moment’. 62 There has been some discussion of Edwards’s doctrine of continuous creation in the recent philosophical-theological literature. 63 The moral problem this raises is that on Edwards’s way of thinking no created thing persists for more than a moment. But if creatures do not persist through time then it is natural to ask how it is that creatures can be the appropriate subject of moral properties, let alone habits and dispositions. It could be argued that things persist through time in virtue of having temporal counterparts or in virtue of being extended four-dimensional entities, and this is indeed Edwards’s view. However, it is still strange to think that numerically distinct entities are treated as one by Providence for the purposes of identity across time and moral responsibility, praise and blame. Yet this too is a consequence of Edwards’s position.
The Problem of Theological Voluntarism
This raises a third related issue, to do with theological voluntarism. In Original Sin Edwards avers that there is no identity or oneness in the case, but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who by his wise sovereign establishment so unites these successive new effects, that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations, and circumstances; and so, leads us to regard and treat them as one. When I call this an arbitrary constitution, I mean, that it is a constitution which depends on nothing but the divine will; which divine will depends on nothing but the divine wisdom. In this sense, the whole course of nature, with all that belongs to it, all its laws and methods, and constancy and regularity, continuance and proceeding, is an arbitrary constitution.
64
He goes on to say, ‘a divine constitution is the thing which makes truth, in affairs of this nature’.
65
He observes, ’Tis this that must account for the continuance of any such thing, anywhere, as consciousness of acts that are past; and for the continuance of all habits, either good or bad: and on this depends everything that can belong to personal identity. And all communications, derivations, or continuation of qualities, properties, or relations, natural or moral, from what is past, as if the subject were one, depends on no other foundation
66
On the face of it, this seems to be straightforwardly voluntarist: God makes truth in continuous creation; the constitution of things depends upon God’s will and wisdom, and nothing else. But if that is the case, then it looks like the way things are constituted is whimsical or capricious—and what does that say about the divine character?
A rather different account of Edwards’s views at this juncture is given by Elizabeth Cochran. She maintains that Edwards presents ‘a theologically coherent understanding of true virtue without resorting to … voluntarist arguments’ of the sort that require that ‘the moral order was established by an arbitrary divine fiat, so that God’s will is the source of morality’. 67 But as we have just seen, this is just what Edwards does affirm in his treatise on Original Sin. Cochran wishes to be charitable to Edwards. As she reads him, ‘salvation, and the enabling of true virtue, are products of God’s will, but the activities of God’s will are formed and dictated by love and goodness’. 68 There are reasons for thinking this when reading, say, The Nature of True Virtue, or Charity and its Fruits, where love is clearly the supreme virtue into which all others can be resolved, and which reflects something essential in the divine nature. Nevertheless, Edwards says something quite different in Original Sin. At the very least there seems to be a tension in Edwards’s thought here, and one that requires his interpreters to make some difficult decisions with respect to the moral implications of his views.
The Problem of Received Human Virtues, Character Formation and Moral Responsibility
This brings us to the matter of received human virtues. Edwards believes that true virtue, as opposed to instincts of nature or natural conscience (which are not of the essence of true virtue, though they can resemble true virtue), is God-given in regeneration. But if true virtue is a gift, then it is difficult to see why Edwards thinks those with true virtue are responsible for their own moral formation. Truly virtuous habits and dispositions are the fruit of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer. They are the product of a reorganized moral nature that has been reset to factory standards, as it were, by being united to the Spirit of God as a consequence of the work of Christ. (Edwards believed that Christ’s atonement purchases the Holy Spirit for the elect.) Add to this his theological voluntarism, and his doctrines of continuous creation and occasionalism, and it really does begin to look like true virtue is just the consequence of an arbitrary work (in Edwards’s sense of a work of the divine will or arbitrium) of God. Certain persons are chosen to exemplify true virtue, and are given the gift of the Holy Spirit as a result.
Nevertheless, Edwards could reply that his account is simply trying to make sense of a biblical picture of virtue. The fact that God elects certain individuals to exemplify true virtue does not necessarily exonerate these individuals from moral responsibility for their actions. Nor does it mean those not chosen to receive this gift are without praise or blame for their actions. Consider the case of someone chosen by lottery to receive a large payout. They did not deserve this outcome. But how is that morally relevant to questions of how the person acts once elevated to the plutocracy? Or suppose that someone is reduced to penury through economic factors beyond their control. Though the person in question has not chosen this state of affairs, she is still a moral agent deserving praise or blame attaching to her actions upon finding herself in straitened circumstances.
Much more would need to be said if we were attempting to shore up Edwards’s position against these objections. Here I have only been able to offer a brief sketch of how an Edwardsian might respond to some of the most pressing problems his Reformed doctrine bequeaths to his moral theology.
Towards an Edwardsian Moral Theology?
We have seen that Edwards is a canonical Reformed theologian whose moral thought is a counterexample to MacIntyre’s claim about the trajectory of Enlightenment (and, by extension, Protestant) ethics after the Reformation. Yet he does not fit within the typical typology of recent Christian theological appropriations of virtue either. He is not a Thomist/Aristotelian, like MacIntyre; and his focus is not that of a Stanley Hauerwas. 69 That is, he doesn’t think of the virtues as a cluster of interconnected moral dispositions that are actualized through habituation in accordance with a particular tradition. Instead, and like Augustine, he thinks that virtue is unified in benevolence, though his particular construal of benevolence is rather different from the bishop of Hippo’s. 70 Nor does he think that virtue is primarily a matter of developing a community of character within the church that is characteristic of Hauerwas’s thought. Instead, he thinks of virtue in primarily aesthetic-theological terms, as some sort of beauty or excellency (to use his term) that can only be perceived if God grants the new sense of the heart that is a pre-requisite for true virtue. 71 His views are not without moral-theological cost, and there do seem to be internal tensions in the underlying metaethical claims he makes about God’s motivation in creating the world. But this is hardly unusual for a thinker involved in a system-building project, like Edwards. Despite these problems, for theologians in the Reformed tradition Edwards presents an interesting case for thinking theologically about the moral life as the development of habits of virtue consequent upon the regenerative action of a sovereign God. Such a position strikes me as a worthy candidate for moral-theological retrieval if it involves repairing as well as recovering aspects of Edwards’s moral-theological project. 72
Footnotes
1.
For recent discussion of this aspect of Reformed thought, see Oliver D. Crisp, ‘Sin’, in Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (eds.), Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), ch. 9.
2.
Kirk J. Nolan, Reformed Virtue After Barth: Developing Moral Virtue Ethics in the Reformed Tradition, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014), p. 11. However, for a rather different account of the role and influence of virtue theory in Reformed thought, see Pieter Vos, ‘Calvinists among the Virtues: Reformed Theological Contributions to Contemporary Virtue Ethics’, Studies in Christian Ethics 28.2 (2015), pp. 201–212.
3.
Thus: ‘It is commonly held that Reformed ethics is basically accomplished as an ethics of divine commandments, creational orders and—to a lesser extent—(human) rights, whereas theological virtue ethics is in particular developed in the Roman Catholic tradition.’ Vos, ‘Calvinists among the Virtues’, p. 201. For an interesting attempt at rapprochement between Reformed divine command theory and post-MacIntyrian narrative and virtue ethics, see Richard J. Mouw, The God Who Commands (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).
4.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. F. H. Peters (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004 [1893]), Bk II. 1, 1103a. (p. 23).
5.
See Vos, ‘Calvinists among the Virtues’, pp. 203–204 and Nolan, Reformed Virtue After Barth, ch. 2, which tackles Karl Barth’s objections to virtue theory.
6.
Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin: The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol 3, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970 [1758]). All references are to the Yale Edition of Edwards’s works in 26 volumes (1959–2008), which can also be found online at the website of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale: 
. Hereinafter cited as WJE followed by volume number and page reference, e.g. WJE 1: 50.
7.
Stephen A. Wilson, Virtue Reformed: Rereading Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics, Brill Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), p. xxv.
8.
WJE 13: 416.
9.
This cuts against the views of those who, like Philip L. Quinn, regard the first chapter of True Virtue as an argument that can (and, perhaps, should) be extracted from its theological context for its philosophical claims alone. See Quinn, ‘Honoring Jonathan Edwards’, Journal of Religion Ethics 31.2 (2003), pp. 299–321, and Quinn, ‘The Master Argument of The Nature of True Virtue’, in Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp (eds.), Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), ch. 6.
10.
See, e.g., the symposium on Edwards’s ethics in Journal of Religious Ethics 31.2 (2003), with contributions from Jean Porter, Stephen A. Wilson, Gerald R. McDermott, William C. Spohn, Roland A. Delattre and Philip L. Quinn. The two most substantial recent treatments of Edwards’s moral thought can be found in Wilson, Virtue Reformed, and Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). Also of note is William J. Danaher Jr., The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004). Amongst older studies of Edwards’s moral thought, Roland A. Delattre’s Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), Norman Fiering’s Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), Clyde A. Holbrook’s work, The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1973), and the editorial introduction to WJE 8 by Paul Ramsey, are worthy of mention. There is also useful material in Stephen R. Holmes, God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), John E. Smith, Jonathan Edwards, Puritan, Preacher, Philosopher (London: Chapman, 1992), and Kyle C. Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
11.
This can be found in WJE 8.
12.
Thus, e.g., Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues; Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards; Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology.
13.
See The End for which God Created the World in WJE 8.
14.
This, and the matter of excellency in the Trinity, is analyzed in detail in Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), ch. 3.
15.
WJE 6: 337.
16.
‘The Mind’, in WJE 6: 364, emphasis original.
17.
WJE 6: 365.
18.
WJE 6: 591–92.
19.
True Virtue in WJE 8: 539. Edwards was an idealist who believed the world comprises created minds and their ideas emanated or ‘communicated’ by God. I have dealt with this at length in Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Crisp, ‘Jonathan Edwards, Idealism, and Christology’, in Joshua R. Farris, S. Mark Hamilton and James S. Spiegel (eds.), Idealism and Christian Theology, Idealism and Christianity Vol. 1 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ch. 8.
20.
WJE 8: 539, emphasis original.
21.
WJE 8: 549.
22.
WJE 8: 557, 571, 594.
23.
Institutes, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1863 [1559]), 2.1.8, p. 217.
24.
WJE 3: 107.
25.
Edwards, Charity and its Fruits in WJE 8: 252–53.
26.
WJE 1: 159, 362–63, and discussion of this in Crisp, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians, ch. 6.
27.
Anri Morimoto makes this an important plank in his claim that Edwards’s understanding of the order of salvation (ordo salutis) is influenced by Catholic as well as Reformation thought. See Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
28.
Paul Ramsey, WJE 8: 739, emphases original. Ramsey shows that language of ‘infusion’ and ‘infused grace’ is found in the Reformed tradition prior to Edwards and is not eccentric.
29.
It seems that for Edwards the Holy Spirit must be present to organize the moral ‘higher principles’ of human nature rightly. Although there is ‘natural conscience’ and a moral sense that work after a fashion in fallen human beings, these cannot rise to the level of being truly virtuous without the action of the Holy Spirit. This seems to be the burden of The Nature of True Virtue, ch. V.
30.
Religious Affections in WJE 2: 205–206.
31.
On Edwards’s way of thinking, the infusion of the Holy Spirit in regeneration is commensurate with the declarative judgment of God in justification according to which human beings are declared to be just on account of the alien righteousness of Christ. It is just that imputed righteousness depends upon the real change brought about in the human heart by the infusion of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, in his sermon ‘Justification by Faith’, Edwards can say ‘What is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal; that is, it is something really in them, and between them, uniting them, that is the ground of the suitableness of their being accounted as one by the Judge’ (WJE 19: 158). For discussion of this point, see Brandon G. Withrow, Becoming Divine: Jonathan Edwards’s Incarnational Spirituality within the Christian Tradition (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), ch. 5.
32.
‘Miscellanies’, 73 in WJE 13: 242. The grammatically incorrect sentence is in the original.
33.
Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues, p. 20.
34.
Quinn, ‘Honoring Jonathan Edwards’, p. 302.
35.
WJE 1, Part III, §4.
36.
WJE 8: 556–57.
37.
WJE 13: 358.
38.
The notion of moral and natural laws here and elsewhere in Edwards’s work has been the subject of much debate. It seems to me that law-like language in Edwards’s thought should not be taken with full metaphysical seriousness, given his account of continuous creation: nothing persists long enough for laws of any kind to persist other than as divine ‘stable ideas’ that God continues to apply to different world-stages at different times. For discussion of this point, see Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation.
39.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory, 3rd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), p. 54.
40.
Ibid.
41.
This is charted by Vos in ‘Calvinists among the Virtues’, pp. 208–209.
42.
Inst. 1.1.2, pp. 38–39.
43.
Recent work that has emphasized this aspect of Calvin’s work includes J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010); William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology, Studies in Christian History and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007); Mark A. Garcia, Life in Christ: Union with Christ and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology, Studies in Christian History and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008); and Carl Mosser, ‘The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin on Deification’, Scottish Journal of Theology 55.1 (2002), pp. 36–57.
44.
Calvin, Inst. 4.17.2 (Ford Lewis Battles trans.).
45.
Edwards avers, ‘I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake: though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing in everything just as he taught’. WJE 1: 131.
46.
Edwards, The End for which God Created the World in WJE 8: 534, and 536 respectively.
47.
WJE 8: 552, emphasis original.
48.
True Virtue in WJE 8: 550, 551.
49.
Charity and its Fruits, Sermon One, WJE 8: 131.
50.
WJE 8: 332.
51.
WJE 8: 380.
52.
WJE 8: 535.
53.
WJE 8: 535.
54.
WJE 8: 536.
55.
For references, see Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation, pp. 24–26.
56.
See Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation and Crisp, ‘Jonathan Edwards and Occasionalism’, in Karl W. Giberson (ed.), Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 10.
57.
Compare Harry Frankfurt (not an occasionalist): ‘If I’m in the condition where I’m doing what I want to do and I really want to do it, i.e. I decisively identify with my action, then I think I’m responsible for it. It makes no difference how it came about that that is the case. If it is the case then it follows that I am fully responsible’. Ortwin de Graef, ‘Discussion with Harry Frankfurt’, Ethical Perspectives 5.1 (1998), pp. 15–43 (32), emphasis original.
58.
Although occasionalism is very much a minority sport, it is not without notable advocates in recent times amongst Christian philosophers. These include Jonathan Kvanvig, Hugh McCann and Alvin Plantinga.
59.
Original Sin in WJE 3: 397.
60.
WJE 3: 398.
61.
WJE 3: 401.
62.
WJE 3: 402, emphasis original.
63.
Examples include Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), and Michael C. Rea, ‘The Metaphysics of Original Sin’, in Dean Zimmmerman and Peter van Inwagen (eds.), Persons: Divine and Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 14.
64.
WJE 3: 403–404.
65.
WJE 3: 404, emphasis original.
66.
WJE 3: 405, emphasis original.
67.
Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues, pp. 25 and 23 respectively.
68.
Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues, p. 31.
69.
Here I follow the helpful characterization of Jean Porter and Stephen Wilson in their co-authored ‘Focus Introduction: Taking the Measure of Jonathan Edwards for Contemporary Religious Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics 31.2 (2003), pp. 183–99 (185–86).
70.
According to some Thomists, Aquinas is not an Aristotelian either. See, e.g., Eleonore Stump, ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’ Ethics’, Faith and Philosophy 28.1 (2011), pp. 29–43.
71.
Porter and Wilson comment, ‘for Edwards, true virtue is not shaped by the community; rather, it is bestowed by God, in accordance with God’s inscrutable decrees’. ‘Taking the Measure of Jonathan Edwards’, p. 187. This seems right.
72.
I am grateful to James Arcadi, Angela McKay Knobel, Christian Miller, Kyle Strobel and J. T. Turner for comments on a previous draft of this article, and to the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation that funded the research.