Introduction

A few years ago Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga offered an account of how Christian belief acquires warrant (if, in fact, Christian belief is true) in the culmination of his series on warrant, Warranted Christian Belief.¹ Key to his discussion of warranted Christian belief is the presentation and explanation of what Plantinga calls the Aquinas/Calvin model (hereafter A/C model) and the extended A/C model.²

The A/C model is initially comprised of Plantinga’s version of the sensus divinitatis,³ which is then extended to include explicitly Christian belief with three elements: the Bible, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit and faith.⁴

Faith, for Plantinga, involves both the intellect and the will and in chapters eight & nine of WCB he goes into some detail as he discusses the cognitive and volitional elements of faith and how the intellect and will relate.

My interest in this discussion centers on Plantinga’s examination of Jonathan Edwards’ understanding of the relationship between the intellect and the will - an examination that occurs in chapter 9 of WCB, and a chapter in which Plantinga examines the “testimonial model.”

In that chapter, his concern is to hypothesize how the intellect and will interrelate, and so he asks which of the faculties of the mind has priority, or which comes first? While his discussion is interesting in its detail and consideration of several possible angles, it seems to neglect a key factor in the reading of Jonathan Edwards.

Plantinga himself doesn’t think that there is any good reason to believe that either faculty has priority or primacy,⁵ but he does see Edwards as having affirmed some type of priority for the intellect.⁶ Although Plantinga undoubtedly probably offers one of the more intricate discussions of the matter, I think he misconstrues Edwards. He appears to read Edwards as some sort of “intellectualist.”⁷

Thesis

Developing a suggestion made by K. Scott Oliphint in his review article of WCB⁸ I propose to demonstrate that Edwards’ concern to tread a new path (i.e., to move away from the hierarchical faculty psychology of his day) by affirming the unified, mutually interrelated operations of the human soul (the “dispositional complex”) may account for the missing element in Plantinga’s assessment of Edwards on the intellect and will.

In other words, while Plantinga’s examination of the relationship between the will and intellect is to be commended, he nevertheless misses Edwards’ major point, which was a rejection of a hierarchical faculty psychology.

Plantinga seems to think that the “affections,” which Edwards speaks of, are something akin to emotions, when in fact, as I hope to show, the affections, for Edwards, involve both the intellect and the will.

Therefore, my goal in this series of posts is not to reject Plantinga’s use of Edwards altogether, but to correct, to enhance, and more carefully nuance what he has accomplished. What I hope to offer here is a suggestive correction. I happen to think that Plantinga’s assessment of Edwards is misconstrued and I hope to show how and why.

Plantinga reads Edwards as a more or less straightforward intellectualist when in fact Edwards stressed the unity and harmony of the distinct powers or operations of the dispositional complex (the human soul). The center of this unified dispositional complex, if I may put it that way, just is the affections. So it is this that stands at the heart of Plantinga’s misunderstanding of the relation between the intellect and will.

Plantinga’s instincts, though, are sound in looking to Jonathan Edwards as providing helpful insights into the discussion of this relationship.

What is so important about asking about whether the intellect or will comes first? It seems to me that the issue of priority involves three elements: (1) Recognizing the distinction of powers within the dispositional complex, whether we can do that or not. (2) Making a value judgement or creating a hierarchy out of these distinctions. In other words, do we have any reason to set one power above another? And (3) reifying the powers or faculties so as to create de facto autonomous individual agents within a single soul.⁹

In the end, with the corrections kept in mind, it may be that Plantinga is closer to Edwards’ own position than he realizes.

Method

My method will be to examine Plantinga’s assessment of the intellect/will issue and his use of Edwards, and then I will compare that assessment with Edwards considered within his own historical context.

After looking at Plantinga’s assessment of Edwards, I will examine some possibilities as to how we can understand the relation of the intellect and will, by providing some parameters for a proper understanding of Edwards.

Then I will look at the historical context in which Edwards formulated his statements on the intellect and will, and from that I will suggest how Edwards is best understood given the categories I will have previously examined.

After my assessment of Jonathan Edwards and in light of possible categories that scholars have put forward for discussions of this matter and the historical context in which he wrote (including a proper understanding of the affections), it will be shown that Jonathan Edwards and Alvin Plantinga may not be that far apart in their understanding of how the intellect and will function together.

In other words, if my thesis is correct, the difference between Plantinga and Edwards is merely one of degree. That is,
Edwards can be understood, as either a concurrentist, a functional intellectualist, or an Augustinian voluntarist because of his move away from faculty psychology and his stress on the unified powers of the dispositional complex.

Edwards is, in fact, as I see it, none of the foregoing, although his perspective embraces elements of each. I hope to bring to bear on Plantinga’s discussion an assessment of Edwards that more carefully considers his views on this subject.¹⁰

End Notes
1 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), hereafter referred to as WCB. The previous two volumes in the trilogy are Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

2 Discussions of these can found on pp. 168-190 and 199-323 respectively in WCB.

3 Plantinga’s treatment of the sensus is problematic, but need not detain us here. See K. Scott Oliphint’s review of WCB which will be referenced below.

4 See Plantinga’s discussion on pp. 242f in WCB.

5 0n p. 303 of WCB Plantinga indicates that he can’t determine, due to the complexity of the interrelationships of the intellect and will (or, to use his terminology, “dependency relationships”) which, if either, has priority. He has reiterated this viewpoint to me in personal correspondence as well.

6 Plantinga, WCB, p. 301.

7 I say “seems” since he doesn’t directly affirm faculty psychology as such. Later remarks in WCB lead me to see some voluntarist leanings (what I would call his “see-sawing”) in Plantinga even though my conclusion is that he is a “concurrentist”.

8 K. Scott Oliphint, “Review: Epistemology and Christian Belief in WTJ, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp.151-182, especially pp. 159-160. Also see Oliphint’s fuller treatment of the subject in his “Jonathan Edwards: Reformed Apologist” in WTJ, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 165-186, especially pp. 170-175.

9 The third element, faculty reification, raised by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser. (Chicago: University of Chicago/Encyclopedia Britannica,1991), II.XXI.5 & 6, is not, as far as I can tell, directly germane to my discussion here. I do think it is involved in Edwards’ rejection of the autonomous faculties in his Freedom of the Will.

10 Plantinga fails to indicate any awareness of this discussion in his book.