Conclusion

How Plantinga Misses the Point

So how, then, does this apparent lack of historical context effect Plantinga’s use of Edwards? Plantinga seems to be unaware of Edwards’ effort to transcend faculty psychology with its hierarchical valuation or gradation of the faculties. He seems to not know that Edwards was trying to walk a middle road between the two extremes of rationalism and enthusiasm that valued one of the powers to the detriment of the other. Or, if he is aware of it, perhaps he disagrees with Edwards or finds him unconvincing or misguided. How would Edwards come across that way if he isn’t already being read through the lens of faculty psychology, as he surely was in the eyes of Charles Chauncey?

Plantinga does seem to read Edwards as a sort of intellectualist with the priority of the intellect in the workings of true affections. That would be true, after a fashion, as long as it is understood that Edwards was trying to move away from faculty psychology although not away from making legitimate distinctions of the powers of the human soul. We can speak of a “priority” of the intellect as long as that priority is understood in terms of taxis or functional order and not primacy of importance. Plantinga also seems to equate the affections with emotions, although this connection is not always clear or hard-and-fast. On the related matter, Plantinga recognizes that sin, for instance, can be understood as blindness, as a not seeing God or the great things of the gospel as the truly lovely things they are. But sin is also a willful blindness. It is a hatred of the loveliness of God and his attributes. We are responsible for our failure to see. We can distinguish the powers of the soul, but we can’t separate them. Nor ought we to consider the intellect or the will more important than the other. After all. God made us with both. Admittedly sin has wreaked its havoc in this area just as it has in others. We sinful human beings tend to prize one power of the soul over another. We still struggle with the same extremes Edwards faced.
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Was Edwards an Intellectualist, a Voluntarist or a Concurrentist?

Edwards was not pioneering the avoidance of the use of distinctions, but he was trying to look at the powers of the soul as working together. What I think he was trying to move away from was the valuation of one faculty over another. In the proper operation of the powers of the soul, it was possible for the intellect or understanding to be enlightened with little or no impact on the will (perhaps some forms of speculative science or Plantingian analytic philosophy might fall into this category) and conversely it may have been possible to move the will with little or no impact on the understanding.⁴⁴ Edwards recognizes these possibilities, but in the exercise of true religious affections, both the intellect and the will were involved. In conversion, it is not a matter of the intellect working without the will nor is it a matter of the will without the intellect or understanding. They work together. Each is necessary and both are essential. After all, how could the will be attracted to or repulsed by something without that object being held in view?⁴⁵ I suppose it is possible to so construe the operation of the will that it performs perceptive or cognitive or speculative functions. But then the question would shift from the relationship of the intellect and will, to the relationship of the cognitive to the volitional or affective aspects or functions of the will. My point is that we would still have to reckon with questions of taxis in the dispositional complex, whether it is the relation of one power or faculty to another or the relations of functions within one faculty.
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