Jonathan Edwards Responds to Deism

Because Edwards believed that deism was a major, perhaps the principal, ideological enemy of Reformed Christianity in the eighteenth century, he constructed his aesthetic revision of Christian faith in ways that often challenged deist proposals.1 By deism I mean the system of thinking that denied that the Bible is revelation, and insisted that morality is the essence and purpose of religion.

Edwards expended considerable effort wrestling with the deist claim that reason alone can show humanity the most basic religious truths. Edwards agreed that reason alone can teach a considerable range of religious truth, but only when connected rightly to a heart that is open to the beauty of God. Reason that is rooted in aesthetic vision can prove the existence of God, tell us what God is like, disclose the purpose of creation, and even perceive God’s excellency.2

But Edwards charged that reason that is not aesthetically grounded—which is what the tradition called “fallen” reason—had shown itself impotent to discover on its own the unity of God (Misc. 519),3 life after death (Misc. 514), the author and purpose of the world, the length of the sabbatical week, the final judgment, the nature of heaven, and sacrifice for sin.4 These things had been shown by God to Adam and Noah, who passed them down by tradition to their descendants. Just because they appear reasonable in hindsight, does not prove that reason originally discovered them.

Most importantly, reason was never able to show how sinful humans could be reconciled to their Creator. Locke and the deists may have been right to say that reason could show the necessity of repentance after sin, but they were wrong to believe that reason could show sinners how to achieve true repentance (Misc. 1304). So assurance of salvation was also impossible to find by reason alone (Misc. 1239). Since God is just, as well as, good, reason can never assure us that God is ready to forgive. What if he has greater regard for justice than mercy? Reason could never prove that he would forgive all sins, no matter how great. Nor could it prove how much repentance is necessary. Therefore the light of nature may show us the general shape of true religion, but it is unable to provide a religion of restoration. In other words, nature reveals God, but humans have not come to know the true God through nature. Even if they had come to this knowledge, they still would not know if God wanted to save them or damn them (Misc. 1304). Apart from grace humans typically misuse the natural knowledge of God for self-justification rather than self-mortification.

Besides failing to provide a religion of restoration, fallen reason has been unable to show God’s excellency or beauty, which is seen only in Christ. This means that even if a person by reason discovered all Christian doctrines and all the moral and natural attributes of God, she still would not have saving knowledge of God. For that knowledge comes through a vision of God’s beauty, which is found most clearly in Christ. Reason abstracted from history and sin is capable of seeing God’s beauty in Christ, but fallen reason as known in this world has proved itself incapable of this aesthetic vision. As Wilson Kimnach has noted, Edwards came to the conclusion that while fallen reason can prove religious propositions to be true, it cannot make them seem real.6

Such vision is impossible without knowledge of Christ that comes through revelation in Scripture. In fact, without knowledge of how it relates to Christ, no doctrine is known rightly (Misc. 519). Hence “the whole of Christian divinity depends on divine revelation” because even truths taught by the light of nature are not taught in that manner in which it is necessary for us to know it, for the knowledge of no truth in divinity is of any significance to us any otherwise than it some way or other belongs to the gospel scheme, or has relevance to Christ the Mediator. It signifies nothing for us to know anything of any one of God’s perfections unless we know them as manifested in Christ, and so it signifies nothing to us to know any part of our duty unless it will [bear] some relation to Christ. It profits us not to have any knowledge of the law of God, unless it be either to fit us for the glad tidings of the gospel or to be a means of our sanctification in Christ Jesus and to influence us to serve God through Christ by an evangelical obedience and therefore we stand in the greatest necessity of a divine revelation. (Misc. 837)

Hence deist knowledge of God is not true knowledge because it denies the revelation of Christ. Even their knowledge that God is one and not many is somehow distorted because it does not acknowledge that the one God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. If God the Redeemer is not known, God the Creator is not known truly.

This also means that all knowledge of God short of regeneration, though that knowledge is propositionally correct, is nevertheless fundamentally distorted. For without a vision of Christ’s beauty, which comes in regeneration, nothing is seen truly. In a passage that may represent the canon within the Edwardsean canon, the New England theologian insisted on the centrality of this vision to all true religious knowledge.

He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which all the world is empty, no better than nothing, yea, worse than nothing. Unless this is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing, for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood, that is worthy of the exercise of the noble faculty of understanding. This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the Infinite Fountain of God; without which God himself (if that were possible to be) would be an infinite evil: without which, we ourselves had better not have been; and without which there had better have been no being. He therefore in effect has nothing, that knows not this.7

For Edwards, failure to know and see these things was the reason deists rejected the “satisfaction” theory of the atonement. Only those with “sensible” (as opposed to “speculative”) knowledge of God’s excellency can imagine the “dreadfulness of the wrath of such a Being” and therefore understand the “natural agreement between affronts of such a majesty and the suffering of extreme misery; it appears much more credible to them that there is indeed an extreme misery to be suffered for sin.” This lack of sensible knowledge explains why many are “blind to the suitableness of Christ’s satisfaction.” They don’t see that this is a “divine contrivance” (Misc. 782).

Nor do they understand transcendence. As a result, they reduce it to human proportions: all the repentance humanity is capable of “is no repentance at all…. it is as little as none in comparison of the greatness of the injury, for it cannot bear any proportion to it.” If God were to pardon simply on the basis of human repentance, it would be “dishonorable to God, just as dishonorable if he pardoned without any repentance at all” (Misc. oo).8 For Edwards, then, reason can show many religious truths, but they are not known properly unless they are seen in relation to Christ and his redemption. The problem, according to Edwards, was not reason itself, but minds which lack the “simple ideas” which are necessary to perceive certain divine things outside the mind. Hence the first explanation of why reason fails is that understanding of divine things requires the presence of certain mental conditions that the unregenerate do not possess. Without those simple ideas, reason cannot function as it ought. Its proper operation depends on a certain disposition of the mind; without that holy disposition, reason is stymied, and cannot see the highest and most essential religious truths. These truths therefore cannot be communicated in simply propositional form to the unregenerate; they are “incommunicable” and “ineffable” because they depend on the presence of simple ideas and a resulting vision that issues from “ten thousand little relations and mutual agreements” (Misc. 201).

Edwards’s second way of explaining reason’s failure was to point to prejudice, which arises from education and custom. The greatest demonstration of human prejudice, for Edwards, was a natural human propensity away from the true God. The fallen human mind, he declared, is “naturally” full of arguments against the gospel. It is prone to idolatry, with a disposition to act contrary to reason.9 The result is “a multiplicity of deceits…thousands of delusions.”10 Human beings “rack their brains” to devise arguments that will stop their consciences and make them feel justified in their sin.11 They do not act rationally, and are incapable of seeing the beauty of divine things, which alone can free reason to work properly.12

Hence for Edwards, reason is capable of knowing God, but only when one’s cognitive faculties are rightly disposed. God cannot be known by “objective” reason that has not been enlivened by spiritual experience. As William J. Wainwright has put it, “A suitably disposed natural reason is thus capable of establishing God’s existence and general nature. Truths which depend on the ideas of holiness and true beauty can also be established by rational arguments, but the force of these can be appreciated only by people with spiritual frames.”13

Therefore reason is not enough. According to Edwards, it can tell many true things about God. But without aesthetic vision it can never get at the reality it was meant to show. For that reason, revelation is necessary.

More than anything else, it was their rejection of the Bible as written revelation that distinguished deists from all their religious adversaries.14 They contended that God had already spoken all human beings need to hear through nature and reason, and that special revelation in the Bible was not only unnecessary but patently fraudulent.

Edwards began his defense of biblical revelation with a series of arguments for its necessity. Since he believed that reason was prevented by sin from leading human beings to the true God, he was convinced that revelation was necessary to supply what fallen reason could not. Only revelation had been able to provide true knowledge of God’s nature and unity, God’s works, creation, government, his great designs, his will, rewards and punishments, the nature and end of human happiness, morality, life after death, the origin of sin, the future state, and the way of redemption (Misc. 128, Misc. 582).

Besides, God is a moral governor. In moral government there is always communication between ruler and ruled, so that the ruled understand the moral rules by which they are to live. Hence it was reasonable that the mind of a ruler should declare his rules to his subjects (Misc. 1338, Misc. 864).

If reason tells us that revelation is necessary because of the need for communication, it also tells us that God’s mercy requires revelation to his intelligent creatures. God has infinite concern for them (Misc. 544), and so would not leave them alone to reason. For it was painfully clear that fallen reason had failed to show the way to true religion (Misc. 249).

Edwards also attacked the deist slogan, “One must doubt revelation because it does not agree with reason.” Edwards argued that this reveals human prejudice. It is analogous to doubting a reliable friend’s report after he has returned from a long journey because what he reports is strange and unfamiliar to us.

But the real problem with the deist slogan is that it ignores the critical distinction between reason as a faculty and reason as a rule. Edwards used another analogy. To accept the deist slogan is like saying, “I’ll never believe a telescope if it shows things different from what my naked eye sees, because my eye is the rule by which I see.” This statement ignores the different senses in which the word “eye” is used: as a bodily organ and a faculty of seeing. To say that it is a rule is only to make the ridiculous assertion that I will refuse to accept as true anything I cannot see with my naked eye. No one actually intends that, but because of their sloppy use of the word “reason” the meaning of their words actually amounts to that.

In the case of the telescope, an acceptable rule could be to accept as true what the best instruments (including the eye and the best telescopes) affirm. This rule would also include correcting a perception of the eye with the best judgment of astronomers (for instance, discounting the eye’s perception that the sun rises and sets). The eye, then, is not a rule but a faculty governed by the use of a rule.

Similarly, deists fail to make a proper distinction between the faculty of reason and the rule of reason. They fail to realize that the faculty of reason is a faculty of judgment— not only our highest but our only faculty of judgment. However, it is not and cannot be our highest rule of judgment. For the judge, and the rule by which he judges, are two different things, as are the judge and the faculty by which he judges. The eye is not a rule but a faculty governed by a rule. So too, the faculty of discerning truth, and a rule to regulate and determine the use of that faculty, are quite different things.

Now if by reason is meant the faculty of reason, Edwards continued, or the power of the mind to see the force of arguments, the statement is even more nonsensical. It is the same as saying that the mind’s ability to see the force of arguments is a surer rule for judging truth than that particular argument: experience. Or, a man’s understanding is a better rule to understand by than a particular means or rule of understanding. This is an “abuse of language!”15

In sum, Edwards concluded, to say that reason is a superior rule to revelation is as foolish as to say that human reason is a test of truth superior to experience.16 The eighteenth century debate over the meaning and roles of tradition and reason helped set the agenda for American theology in the next two centuries. That debate is critical to understanding not only the intellectual and political disputes of the eighteenth century but also their reverberations in the twenty-first.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2003).