In recognition of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, Modern Reformation editors have solicited essays from a number of authorities on Calvin's life and work. Not all of our writers are "Calvinists" (that is, they would not all necessarily agree with him or follow in his theological footsteps), but each has identified a particular point of Calvin's thought that helps contribute to an overall perspective of Calvin's influence in his time and ours. We're grateful to these writers, some of whom might not normally appear in our pages, for lending us their own words as we contemplate the many faces of John Calvin.
In his Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards wrote, "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 everything just as he taught."
Edwards lived in an age different from Calvin, and he had different projects. Not to further an "orderly" reformation of the church by the Word of God, but to confront the rationalism of his day with its own weapons-with the help of the philosophy of his hero John Locke (theologically, an Arminian), as well as that of Sir Isaac Newton (a deist), and with a robust and self-confident appeal (when necessary) to "reason" and a remorseless use of logic. His project was to turn the intellectual weapons of "enlightened" thinkers against themselves, and to find in these very weapons support for the Reformed orthodoxy and Puritanism of New England. So he largely replaced the scholasticism of another of his heroes, Peter van Mastrict, with this more "modern" outlook.
So why, with all these changes, did Edwards not take it amiss to be called a Calvinist?
To try to answer that question, we must note two or three factors. To begin with, though Calvin had been widely translated into English and the translations were best-sellers in Elizabethan England, by Edwards's time his personal influence among Anglophone readers had faded. It is almost impossible to find a direct quotation from Calvin in Edwards's voluminous writings. Hence the appropriateness of Edwards's statement that he did not treat Calvin as a personal authority. But, he says, was nevertheless a Calvinist "for distinction's sake." What did he mean?
The term "Calvinist" had been coined by Lutherans who objected to John Calvin's distinctive view of the "real presence" of Christ at the Supper. But then, after Calvin's death and with the onset of the Arminian movement on the continent of Europe and through Laudian influence in England, "Calvinism" became colored and identified by the agenda of the Arminian conflict. Calvinism came to refer to a set of tenets defined in terms of the struggle with the Arminians. That was the "distinction"-between Arminian and Calvinist-for the sake of which Edwards was prepared to be known as a Calvinist. Calvinism came to have an exclusively soteriological connotation; Calvin's view of church and state, together with his ecclesiology-the whole of the matter of Book 4 of the Institutes-was largely lost from view. This was the era of "doctrinal Calvinists," when-along with Presbyterians and Episcopalians-Baptists and Congregationalists could equally be "Calvinists."
Edwards was a Calvinist in this sense: restricted in one way, broadened in another. What did this mean in practice? One thing it meant was Edwards's adherence to the Puritan theology of his forbears, such as Shepherd and Norton and Owen and Flavel and their contemporaries in Holland. So the parameters of Edwards's great works-Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will and Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin-were set by this "Calvinist" theology.
Whereas Calvin was at home in the philosophy and the culture of the ancient world-the world of Plato, Cicero, and Augustine, for example-Edwards had a modern outlook. His fear was Arminianism; but beyond that, deism. And one recurring theme in his writings is an attempt to make God immediate to his readers. Anyone who thought he could keep God at a distance by the exercise of his free will, or by participating in the half-way covenant (the invention of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard), or who thought that God was bound by the iron laws of the newly discovered physics, was in for a shock. The title of his best-known, notorious sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" contains the key. We are all "in the hands of" God, whether we like it or not. Our efforts to shake free of his fingers will fail. But the Savior beckons. This was Calvin's and the Reformers' emphasis on the sovereignty of God's grace, but with a new twist.
Edwards conveyed this same message, whether it was through the pulpits of Northampton and Stockbridge in Massachusetts, or through his writings reaching the studies and libraries of the East Coast and of Europe. Whether, as he came to articulate this message, his project was a success, continues to be debated. Did he so stress divine immediacy as to undermine the reality and efficacy of created causes? Perhaps he did. Did he so stress the divine sovereignty as to articulate a form of panentheism? Perhaps he did. What cannot be doubted is that he attempted to rearticulate the tenets of "Calvinism" in a trenchant and confident way that has not been matched since.
