Customer Reviews

Ethical Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards Series, Volume 8) (Vol 8)

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This volume contains two major works of Jonathan Edwards: an unpublished text of a series of sermons he preached in 1738, know as Charity and Its Fruits, and his Two Dissertations. I. Concerning the End for Which God Created the World. . On the Nature of True Virtue, published post-humously in 1765. Together these writings set out the principles of Edwards' ethical thought.

Though it bears the aggregate title of "Ethical Writings," the texts and editorial commentary in this volume indubitably provide the best available way to gain a rich and broad understanding of Edwards' theological program. If you have to buy only one of the Yale Works of Jonathan Edwards series, I think this is it.

Jonathan Edwards's Complete Works, Volume 8, published in 1989 by the Yale University Press, and edited by Paul Ramsey, is an early fruit of Yale's effort to publish the complete published and unpublished works of one of this country's two or three most important intellectuals (in the running with Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Charles Sanders Peirce). The volume contains four principle components.

1. A 100 page editor's introduction by Ramsey. This is a monograph in itself and worthy of its charges.
2. Fifteen Sermons on Paul's 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, principally on the nature of love.
3 Two Dissertations (Unpublished in Edwards's Lifetime
a. Concerning the End for Which God Created the World
b. The Nature of True Virtue

The volume ends with an unpublished letter, addressee unknown, and five Appendices

1. Fragments of Joseph Bellamy's copy of the Charity sermons.
2. 17 page draft of Edwards on Moral Sense
3. 33 page draft on "Heaven Is a Progressive State
4. 12 page draft on Infused Virtues in Edwardsean and Calvinistic Context
5. Defying and Assisting the Spirit

Before laying out $100 for a copy of this volume, please be aware that the complete volume, along with the complete text of 73 volumes completed so far, is available to browse, search and copy pages from:

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What is unfortunate is that this volume contains one of Edwards's four most important works, "The Nature of True Virtue", and that the volumes containing two of the others, "Religious Affections" and "The Freedom of the Will" are in paperback for $20, cheap for books of that size.

This huge publishing effort attests to the fact that there has been a revival of interest in Jonathan Edwards, dating back to the publication of Perry Miller's biography of Edwards in 1949 (even if that interest has not yet reached the lecture rooms of my seminary.) This is important because it seems as if the myriad of contextual theologies is desperately looking for a new way to remediate everything from the blues to ecological disaster. The main problem much of these efforts have is that their political needs drive them off the reservation of Christian doctrine. Without saying as much, the various feminist movements (at least four at present count) would want to rewrite the Nicene Creed, except that none seem to have what it takes to make that step. What they come up with, instead, is new myths and cosmologies which have only a passing resemblance to main stream Protestantism, let alone Roman Catholicism. And yet, here all the time, is Jonathan Edwards's theology which is Puritan ramrod straight orthodox, and yet with nuances which satisfy it is that some feminists would like to find.

The heart of Edwards's ethical theology is in "The Nature of True Virtue", whose explanatory power for all sorts of issues I find truly remarkable. On the one hand, it is comfortable, if not wholly committed to Luther and Calvin's notions of predestination and value. On the other, it provides a theoretical foundation for all the things proposed by the English moralists of Edwards's day, such as Locke, Butler, Hutcheson, and Hume, explaining, on the one hand, they are driven by the ingenuity of God's creation and, on the other hand, are not the goal of "True Virtue". He thereby provides a solution (I'm not sure it is a perfect solution) to Augustine's problem of "Splendid Vices". That's the problem of the pride involved in wishing to be humble, and endeavoring to do so, when you are not yet there.

What may be the most brilliant discernment is his identifying the rightful motive to attain true virtue is in the admiration of the beauty of the Trinity, a property which would be absent from the Godhead if it were purely monadic. This answers one of the biggest objections of feminist critics of orthodox Christianity, which based its theology on the Greek philosophical notion of divine perfection which, if it could change, would no longer be perfect. One can appreciate how absurd this notion is when you ponder the similar reasoning which leads to the paradoxes of Zeno such as why Achilles could never beat a tortoise in a foot race. The Greeks simply did not understand the notions of velocity and acceleration, which are based on the calculus.

Some scholarly commentators have even believed that one could call Edwards's theology a panentheism, which is exactly what Jürgen Moltmann and Sallie McFague have called their ecologically aware theologies.

One thing which surprised me about the central essay on True Virtue is that the writing is at least as powerful as rhetoric as Edwards's sermons in the same volume. The sermons show some signs of being written almost by rote, playing out ideas Edwards had in his stockpile of themes, phrases, and notions. The essay, on the other hand, seems freshly reasoned.

Even if you do not buy this regrettably overpriced volume, I hope you take a look at these two Dissertations. And, if you want them in the very best form possible, read them on the Yale web site or ask for this volume for your birthday.