Jonathan Edwards: A Reformed Arminian Engagement

Contents

Arminians and Jonathan Edwards? Really?

Jonathan Edwards: Reflections on His Life and Ministry

Edwards on Original Sin and Depravity

The Atonement and Justification by Faith in Jonathan Edwards

Saints in the Hands of an Authentic Guide: Learning Piety from Jonathan Edwards

Ineffectual Grace in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards against Free Will

Jonathan Edwards on Perseverance

About the Editor

About the Contributors

Name and Subject Index

Scripture Index

"This book is needed now. The rapidly changing landscape of Methodism, pan-Wesleyanism, and more broadly Protestant evangelicalism in North America means the establishment of new boundary lines. Taking a sober, holistic, integrated, and honest look at one of the most important of the North American ‘church fathers,’ this work makes for a more unified, empathetic, and ultimately more effective church for reaching a post-Christian world. This book, with the spirit in which it is written, is the kind of work that will simply make the church better in the immediate future."

—Matt Ayars, president and professor of biblical studies, Wesley Biblical Seminary

"Jonathan Edwards: A Reformed Arminian Engagement offers the portrayal of Edwards as a link between Calvinism and Arminianism. This insightful perspective on Edwards, marked by an irenic tone, makes a fresh and creative contribution to the ongoing discussions in Edwards studies. There is unanimous consensus that Edwards was America’s greatest theologian, even as this book scrutinizes certain aspects of Edwardsean Calvinism. This page-turner offers a captivating exploration that underscores the real divergences between Calvinists and Reformed Arminians. In the process, it dispels some of the caricatures associated with Arminianism. Matthew Pinson and others in this volume maximize the areas of agreement while shedding light on genuine disagreements. Can Arminians find common ground with Edwards? The resounding answer from Reformed Arminians is a definite yes!"

—Chris Chun, director of the Jonathan Edwards Center and professor of church history, Gateway Seminary

This collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of the nuanced differences between Classic Reformed theology and Reformed Arminianism. Utilizing Jonathan Edwards as a case study, these essays identify nuanced differences and similarities between Edwards and Reformed Arminianism on topics ranging from depravity and atonement to grace, free will, and perseverance. Along the way, several contributions also contrast Reformed Arminianism with Wesleyan Arminianism. Any discussion of the differences between the Dordt version of Reformed theology and Reformed Arminianism and Wesleyan Arminianism must engage this book.

—John Mark Hicks, emeritus professor of theology, Lipscomb University

This book consists of a serious engagement by Free Will Baptists, who identify themselves as brothers in the Reformed stream of historical theology, with the theology and piety of Jonathan Edwards. Its authors’ grasp of the secondary literature is profound, and their interaction with primary Edwardsean texts shows an impressive, sympathetic, and instructive depth of understanding. The authors are insightful concerning their points of difference with Edwards and give a cogent defense of their doctrinal viewpoint, while maintaining a provocative appreciation of the wide range of positive doctrinal and spiritual instruction in Edwards. Because every reader will be edified from the breadth and depth of their critical observations concerning Edwardsean theological formulation, I recommend the book heartily.

—Thomas J. Nettles, senior professor of historical theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

"Jonathan Edwards: A Reformed Arminian Engagement is a unique collection of essays that truly models the art of charitable, appreciative, and balanced theological disagreement. Pinson and his contributors celebrate the piety and influence of one of America’s most important Christian thinkers, highlighting common ground as well as offering pointed critiques of aspects of Edwards’s theology that they find most troubling. This book is a must read for anyone engaged in Edwards studies or who just wants a better understanding of classical Arminian theology."

—Rhyne Putman, vice president for academic affairs and professor of Christian ministries, Williams Baptist University

A positive Arminian engagement with Jonathan Edwards seems as paradoxical as the nomenclature of Reformed Arminianism itself. In this creative retrieval of tradition, the authors seek to recover a broader Reformed tradition over against the labels and divisions that have marked the heirs of the Reformation. The beauty and sensibilities of Edwards’s writings are realized, while sovereignty, depravity, and assurance are refurbished for Arminian thought. As the landscape of evangelical thought shifts, this nuanced approach with its generous attitude can help to rectify overstated theological partitions.

—W. Brian Shelton, professor of theology and chair of Christian studies and philosophy, Asbury University

Jonathan Edwards: A Reformed Arminian Engagement

Copyright © 2024 by J. Matthew Pinson

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All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-0877-7747-4

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Subject Heading: EDWARDS, JONATHAN \ CLERGY--BIOGRAPHY \ PROTESTANT CHURCHES--CLERGY

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Foreword

Michael A. G. Haykin

Jonathan Edwards has been rightly described as America’s Augustine. It is a very apt moniker. For just as one can describe Western Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, as Augustinians, given the undoubted influence of the North African pastor-theologian on occidental Christianity, so one can depict Anglophone Protestant believers as Edwardseans. To be sure, this is something of an exaggeration, but it helps to capture the enormous influence that the New England theologian has had upon successive generations of Christians in the English-speaking world.

Now, one of the great concerns that Edwards has bequeathed to us is how to uphold both divine sovereignty and human responsibility. The eighteenth century was deeply shaped by a hunger for freedom that exploded in various revolutions—political, intellectual, even sexual—and Edwards found himself having to relate his inherited Calvinist tradition to this new world that was framed by this passion for liberty. In Edwards’s day, one of the theological perspectives that grappled with the nature of human liberty was one that he both feared and rejected, namely, Arminianism. But, as J. I. Packer once argued, there are various types of Arminianisms. And in this book we encounter what one can well call Edwardsean Arminianism, that is, an Arminianism that sees in much of Edwards’s literary corpus a helpful guide to Christian life and thought.

Yet, even as modern-day Calvinistic Evangelicals do not follow Edwards in all that he believed (for example, his contradictory view of slavery and the slave trade—a view that even his close mentee, Samuel Hopkins, rejected), so the authors of the essays in this fine collection are quite prepared to acknowledge Edwards as an important mentor in their lives and yet part company with him on certain issues that relate to freedom and soteriology.

Yes, a collection of Reformed Arminian essays on one regarded as a quintessential Calvinist is a surprising turn of events, but it is a turn that is both a profitable and an enjoyable read.

Michael A.G. Azad Haykin

Professor of Church History

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Dundas, Ontario

12 November 2023

Preface

Jonathan Edwards is the hero of the New Calvinism. Collin Hansen and other writers have discussed the fascination with Edwards by many in the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement. Yet Edwards was a complex and nuanced thinker and preacher whose theological sensibilities are worth engaging from quarters of the church catholic outside Calvinism. This volume does that by featuring essays that consider Edwards’s theology from the vantage point of a unique stream of Arminian theology known as Reformed Arminianism.

Contemporary Reformed Arminianism follows the original teachings of Jacobus Arminius and some of the early Remonstrants, who saw themselves and their theology as consistent with the broad stream of confessional Reformed theology in Europe in the sixteenth century. Arminius always saw himself teaching and writing in harmony with the historic Reformed confessions. His thought and its modern rearticulation by those identifying with the historic Reformed tradition (as opposed to many contemporary Wesleyan Arminians) provides an enlightening conversation partner to Jonathan Edwards’s thought which, for some, is seen as virtually synonymous with Calvinism. The minority report of the Reformed Arminians pushes back against the characterization of Arminius as non-Reformed. This book aims to engage Edwards’s theology critically from within the broad Reformed tradition. Its goal is to offer alternative expressions of fidelity to the early Reformed confessions without the troubling deterministic metaphysics associated with Edwards’s thought.

A Reformed Arminian engagement with the thought of Jonathan Edwards, therefore, provides a unique opportunity for constructive theological dialogue that will draw in people from a large number of constituencies, from Calvinist to Arminian to other varieties of non-Calvinists. The contributors to this book hope to challenge the complacency that often accompanies the hard lines too often drawn between confessional traditions and traditional theological systems in the Calvinist-Arminian debate.

This volume originated with a series of papers presented a decade ago at the annual Theological Symposium of the Commission for Theological Integrity of the National Association of Free Will Baptists. At the time I was program coordinator for the symposium under the direction of F. Leroy Forlines, who had served on the Commission for five decades, most of that time as Chairman. When I pitched the idea for a symposium theme on a Reformed Arminian engagement with the Calvinist titan Jonathan Edwards, Professor Forlines was elated, and he encouraged me to collect the papers and edit them for publication. The volume you hold in your hands is the plant that eventually grew from those seeds ten years ago.

Leroy Forlines and his colleague at Welch College Robert E. Picirilli were the chief twentieth-century proponents of a unique variety of Arminianism that has come to be known as Reformed Arminianism. Forlines and Picirilli systematized a homiletical tradition in the Free Will Baptist Church that had been handed down from the first Free Will Baptists in America—English General Baptists who had crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies in the late seventeenth century. Those General Baptists stood in the venerable tradition of writers such as Thomas Helwys and Thomas Grantham.

Forlines was the systematic theologian, while Picirilli was the biblical theologian. Picirilli was the first to use the term Reformed Arminianism, in the preface to the inaugural volume of the Randall House New Testament Commentary on Romans written by Forlines. Picirilli wrote:

If there were such a phrase, I would say that Free Will Baptists are Reformed Arminian. I would immediately be accused of contradiction, of course. If I reminded my accuser that Arminius himself was Reformed, he would probably remind me in turn that Arminius’s followers (after his death) were turned out of the Reformed Church. Even so, I think that many Christians will be at least a little surprised to learn that there are Arminians who believe in total depravity, in the eternal (conditional) election of individuals to salvation, in Christ’s death as penal, substitutionary (universal) atonement that fully satisfied the just demands of a holy God for the infinite punishment of sin, in salvation (including perseverance in salvation) that is conditioned on faith and not on works or merit.¹

Though Picirilli subsequently used the descriptor Reformation Arminianism and Forlines the phrase Classical Arminianism, Reformed Arminianism had already caught on among some of their younger protégés such as Stephen M. Ashby and myself.

That terminology signified for many of us a way to engage in what Timothy George has called retrieval for the sake of renewal. The prospect that Arminian theology could be renewed by retrieving a Reformed theology shorn of its undesirable—and unbiblical—associations with a deterministic metaphysic and a historically idiosyncratic emphasis on an irresistible gratia particularis (particular grace) was enlivening. That is because many younger Arminians at the turn of the twenty-first century had grown weary of caricatures of Arminianism from Calvinists and Arminians alike. The primary caricature was of a semi-Pelagian works-righteousness reminiscent of Charles Finney that relied on Holiness models of sanctification and spirituality, confident in the ability of natural reason to discover divine truth without special revelation or reach out to God without special grace.

The breadth of Reformed confessional theology before the crystallization and exclusion process of the Synod of Dort in 1618–1619 gave figures such as Jacobus Arminius freedom to embody just such a broadly Reformed theology. Arminius and other thinkers, with the rest of the Christian tradition, affirmed the gratia universalis and gratia resistibilis but did so without jettisoning the beauty of sixteenth-century Reformed thought. (I will discuss this further in Chapter One.)

A Reformed Arminian engagement with Jonathan Edwards’s nuanced Calvinistic brand of Reformed theology provides a wonderful way to show how Arminians and Calvinists can take part in fruitful dialogue. It also points a way forward in probing ways in which commonalities with Calvinism that arise from the Reformed roots of Arminianism can bring renewal to the Arminian theological project. It is with thanks to God that I and the other contributors of these essays commend this book to readers who share these aims.

J. Matthew Pinson

April 23, 2023

1. F. Leroy Forlines, Romans, The Randall House New Testament Commentary, Robert E. Picirilli, gen. ed. (Nashville: Randall House, 1987), viii.

Chapter 1

Arminians and Jonathan Edwards? Really?

J. Matthew Pinson

A book about Arminians and Jonathan Edwards? Really? one might ask, recalling young New Calvinists wearing T-shirts with Jonathan Edwards is My Homeboy" emblazoned on them. ¹ Such a quizzical response is not surprising in our current evangelical climate, for two reasons. First, we evangelicals tend, now more than ever, to remain insulated cozily in our tribes, unlike the evangelicals of a bygone era. Second, what is thought of as Arminianism today is often diametrically opposed to Edwards’s Reformed mentality.

To be sure, strong disagreements among Protestants from various confessional perspectives are nothing new. Yet there has always been a degree of warmth and fellowship among many Protestants from different traditions. Everybody read the Calvinist Congregationalist Matthew Henry. Presbyterians appreciated the Baptist Charles Spurgeon’s preaching. Baptists quoted Anglican Bishop J. C. Ryle. Someone once asked the Calvinist preacher George Whitefield, Will we see Wesley in heaven? Whitefield’s response was, I fear not. He will be so near the throne, and we shall be at such a distance, that we shall hardly get a sight of him. ²

Not every evangelical today has a contentious spirit regarding theological differences, including Arminianism and Calvinism. Not too long ago, I was standing in front of a 9Marks book stall at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which is led by my friend (and Calvinist) Mark Dever. As I was scanning the shelves, my eyes landed on a book by the staunch Calvinist Iain Murray published by Banner of Truth. It was a spiritual biography of John Wesley and some early Wesleyans with an endorsement by the Presbyterian Sinclair Ferguson describing it as a thrilling history and biography, the bringing to light of forgotten men of extraordinary faith and energy for Christ. ³

Sadly, however, one need not search too far on the internet about Arminianism and Calvinism before discovering videos from well-known Calvinist personalities asking the question Can Arminians be saved? with the individual assuring, Yes, sure, it is possible for them to be saved. In an environment in which such a video can be posted, with a straight face and that question in the heading, one can understand why the average reader would be surprised to find a group of Arminians writing appreciatively of a figure like Jonathan Edwards.

Inaccurate Perceptions of Arminianism

Still, the fact remains that today’s Arminianism is almost always marked by what distinguishes it from the Reformed tradition, not by its commonalities with Reformed theology and spirituality. Some of this has to do with caricatures Calvinists often make of Arminianism. Yet there is a grain of truth in some of these caricatures.

Much that passes for Arminianism today is really what we might call Finneyism, a semi-Pelagian brand of Christianity that de-emphasizes divine sovereignty and overemphasizes individuals and their free will to choose, thereby downplaying the effects of the fall. ⁴ Of course, traditional Arminianism, whether of the Wesleyan variety or the more Reformed approach espoused in this book, eschews semi-Pelagianism and affirms total depravity. ⁵ Still, many traditional Wesleyans treat the prevenient grace they believe is necessary for the conversion of sinners like a blanket that fell on humanity as a result of Christ’s atonement. In this view, prevenient grace universally reverses the effects of the fall and makes everyone automatically able to respond to the gospel.

Calvinists, like Reformed Arminians, believe that this view grants the doctrine of total depravity with one hand while taking it away with the other. Reformed Arminians affirm that God, in his own mysterious way and timing, gives everyone sufficient grace for their eventual conversion, if they do not resist it. Yet they see this prevenient (beforehand) grace as an individually directed wooing and suasion. In this way, prevenient grace is not at all like what my friend Stephen Ashby has called a dense fog that settled on humanity, mitigating its depravity. ⁶

Most self-professed Arminians do not subscribe to penal substitutionary atonement and its concomitant justification solely by the righteousness of Christ imputed to believers through faith. This makes Reformed people wary of them.

Furthermore, Arminians are often caricatured—sometimes for legitimate reasons—as having discarded key orthodox formulations traditionally associated with evangelical Protestantism. Leading Arminian thinkers, for example, comfortably deny the infallibility of the phenomena of Scripture, limiting it to matters of doctrine and morals. Others seem giddy about N. T. Wright and his novel reinterpretation of Pauline soteriology. ⁷ Still others affirm postconservative and postpropositional theology. Thus it makes sense that confessionally Reformed Christians would have concerns about Arminianism.

Arminius as a Reformed Theologian

When one goes back to Arminius, however, one sees none of the abovementioned characteristics. The more one reads Arminius, the more his Reformed convictions become evident. That is true whether one means Reformed in a broad, modern sense or in the more narrowly defined terms of the Synod of Dort that condemned Arminianism as heresy in 1619. Arminius was more broadly Reformed in the modern sense of that term than most Arminians are today. Yet he was fully Reformed in his day, fitting comfortably within the confines of the Reformed confessions and catechisms before the Synod of Dort that condemned Arminianism as heresy in 1619.

Arminius not only affirmed traditional Protestant confessional orthodoxy but he also agreed wholeheartedly with the confessional standards of the sixteenth-century Dutch Reformed churches, the Belgic Confession of Faith and Heidelberg Catechism. When one reads these confessional documents, one sees that the details of the five points of Calvinism are not spelled out in them. The same is true of all sixteenth-century Reformed confessional standards. So someone like Arminius, or the authors of the chapters in this book, could subscribe to both documents with no difficulty (of course, no Baptist could subscribe to certain ecclesiological elements in them). ⁸

Some Calvinist scholars, following Richard Muller, try to drive a wedge between Arminius and the Reformed tradition. ⁹ I will grant that increasingly in the late sixteenth century, the teachings of Arminius—like that of precursors of his such as Albert Hardenberg, Anastasius Veluanus, Johannes Holmannus Secundus, and Gellius Snecanus—began to clash with the mainstream of scholastic Reformed dogmatics. ¹⁰ However, the assertion of some scholars that Arminius contradicted confessional Reformed theology before Dort simply cannot be sustained, since total depravity is the only point of the five points of Calvinism that was clearly affirmed in the sixteenth-century Reformed confessions and catechisms. What we see, therefore, in Arminius and his early followers in the Netherlands, as well as the English General Baptists, whose major writers came closest to his soteriology, is a warm affirmation of the Reformed faith.

This type of Reformed theology strongly affirmed divine sovereignty but wisely steered clear of the divine determinism into which much Reformed teaching morphed. This was a sovereignty in the biblical sense that God is sovereign and will punish or banish those who do not comply with the terms of his covenant with them. It was a sovereignty in the sense that God providentially rules and guides his creation and that nothing is outside his purview, even when he permits sin and evil that arises from human freedom. It was a sovereignty in the sense of Abraham Kuyper’s famous comment, There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine! ¹¹

However, Arminius’s view of divine sovereignty was resolutely not a divine determinism in which every thought, intent, and moral choice made by sinful human beings is determined by God and is just as he wants it to play out. It was not a divine decision to give the grace necessary for conversion only to a select few and purposefully deprive the mass of humanity of that grace, while still holding them responsible for resisting it and enlarging their punishment the more they do so. This approach to divine sovereignty was well within the confines of the Reformed confessions and catechisms of the sixteenth century.

Divine sovereignty and total depravity are the doctrines that made Reformed theology what it was. God through Christ is Lord over all. He created us for himself and made a covenant with us, and we broke that covenant and fell and came under his curse. The only way to be redeemed from this curse is for God in Christ to fulfill the law on our behalf through his sinless life and his death on the cross and impute that righteousness to us through faith. Yet the details of the free will-determinism debate and how it impinges on the doctrines of the universality or particularity, or the resistibility or irresistibility, of divine grace were left open questions in pre-Dort Reformed confessional theology.

The Beauty of Reformed Theology

The question then becomes, Can one take advantage of the beauty of Reformed theology and still be an Arminian on the gratia universalis and gratia resistibilis (universal, resistible grace)? Reformed Arminians answer this question with a resounding yes.

F. Leroy Forlines, the systematic theologian who mentored so many Reformed Arminians either personally or through his writings, showed what this looked like. He drank deeply from the well of Reformed scholastic theology as mediated through the two American writers he most frequently quoted: William G. T. Shedd and Charles Hodge. He joyfully concurred with these and other Reformed thinkers on total depravity and its far-reaching effects on what he often referred to as the total personality—our intellect, will, and affections. He agreed that God is sovereign over all and that we can come into our own as human beings created in God’s image only when we bow to the lordship of Christ in the whole of life. He affirmed the classic Reformed understandings of penal satisfaction in atonement and the imputation of the active and passive obedience of Christ to the believer in justification. He rejoiced in the five solae as interpreted by the consensus of sixteenth-century Reformed theology: sola gratia (grace alone), sola fide (faith alone), solus Christus (Christ alone), sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), and soli Deo gloria (the glory of God alone). ¹²

This Reformed Arminian approach to understanding Christian theology and the Christian life differs from Calvinism on how one comes to be in a state of grace. Yet it agrees with Calvinism on what it means to be in a state of grace. This agreement with Calvinism on what it means to be in a state of grace