Jonathan Edwards's Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will by Philip John Fisk (review)

Philip Fisk is senior researcher in Historical Theology at the Jonathan Edwards Center Benelux. In this book, he compares Edwards's understanding of freedom of the will to what he calls the classic Reformed understanding of this. Fisk excavates this classic Reformed understanding from commencement theses and quaestiones at Harvard and especially Yale during Edwards's time there, and through a close reading of the writings of Adriaan Heereboord (1614–1661) and Charles Morton (1627–1698) that were studied by divinity students of Edwards's generation. For Fisk, it is primarily Heereboord who represents the classic Reformed understanding of freedom of the will as the power ad utrumlibet, to choose otherwise than one does. In this understanding, while one's will may be determined by God to some extent, there is always an element of contingency to one's choice. One could always have chosen otherwise. At several points, Fisk suggests that this is how freedom of the will has been understood in the main currents of Christian theology prior to Edwards. In this view, there is an indeterminacy to the will, whether it be God's decision to create the world or a person's response to God's grace. Edwards departed from this with his notion of moral necessity. While creation is not ontologically necessary for God, in Edwards's view, it is morally necessary. As God is good and always does what is good, and as God is able to create the world that is essentially good, it is morally necessary for God to do so. Moral necessity works through freedom. One exercises one's capacity to choose free of external constraint. But one's choice is determined by one's moral vision and sense of self. For Edwards, the human will, while free to choose, always chooses what appears to it to be the greatest good.

Fisk argues that Edwards's argument removes all contingency from God's relationship to the world and from human action in history (that was Edwards's intent) and that this departs from the classic Reformed understanding of the will as a self-determining power. The target of Edwards's criticism in Freedom of the Will was the Arminian understanding that people are ultimately responsible for the choices they make and, thus, for their own salvation. For Edwards, there was always a cause or reason for every decision, be it God's or humanity's, and ultimately, this cause was the will of God, which was determined by God's goodness and beauty. Fisk views Heereboord's understanding of the freedom of the will to be correct and argues that Edwards is mistaken in arguing that events are so determined by God that they cannot be different than they are, thus denying any reality of contingency in creation or history.

In one sense, Fisk is correct. The Bible is the story of two freedoms: that of God and that of humanity. The first is infinite; the second is finite. Both are real. Edwards's preaching presupposed the reality of the latter, but in Freedom of the Will, his emphasis on divine sovereignty tended to obscure this. Yet, Edwards's understanding of moral necessity is more insightful than Fisk is willing to recognize. Edwards's understanding of the will as always ultimately determined by what appears to it to be the greatest good finds contemporary echoes in Charles Taylor's notion of strong evaluation, which sees choices as being made in response to a notion of the good that impinges upon us and so determines our will. Edwards recognized that human freedom, while real in its exercise, is always conditioned in its choices. Yet this conditioning does not make human choices automatic. While one's choice is always determined by what appears to one to be the greatest good, there is often an...