The Historical Context of Jonathan Edwards’ Discussion of the Intellect and Will

The Great Awakening & Factions

In order to properly understand Edwards at this point, it is essential that we understand his own historical context for it is here that we will clearly see the contours of his views as they are compared and contrasted with those of his theological opponents.

The social context into which Edwards spoke was, of course, the age of the Great Awakening. But what is it about the Great Awakening that could be of interest here? It is the fact that the nature of the human soul and its various powers was at the heart of many of the debates of that era.

The basic question was whether the Great Awakening in its day was a legitimate work of God or the work of excited passions or (worse still), the work of the Devil. Jonathan Edwards, in endeavoring to defend the awakenings that occurred in his parish in Northampton and across the colonies, endeavored to plow a middle row between the two extremes (the “two great armies”) of rationalism on the one hand and unbridled enthusiasm on the other.

What this meant was that he challenged the regnant faculty psychology of his day in order to pioneer a path toward a better understanding of the human personality or soul or mind. In other words, Edwards was not conducting an abstract examination of the human soul. He was endeavoring to deal with the two extremes in the awakening that he deemed problematic.
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Various Ways of Understanding the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Before I endeavor to answer the question of whether Plantinga has properly understood Edwards, it might be helpful to consider various ways in which the intellect and will are understood to relate to one another in the literature on the subject.¹ What I discuss here is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather it is suggestive only.

Putting the matter as simply as possible, there are two general ways to understand the relationship between the intellect & the will, along with some significant variation within these two broad perspectives. These two categories are intellectualism and voluntarism.
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Plantinga’s Own Assessment of the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Alvin Plantinga discusses the relationship between the intellect and will in chapters eight and nine of WCB where he deals with that relationship with regard to the occurrence of faith that he outlines in the extended A/C model. According to Plantinga, faith involves both cognitive and affective aspects.

What does this mean?

Plantinga is endeavoring to make the point that faith is more than strictly an intellectual entity (i.e., that faith is more than just knowledge that God exists and assent to that knowledge). If sin has both cognitive and affective elements, so, then, does faith.”¹

It is not necessary to reproduce Plantinga’s discussion of the relationship between the intellect and the will here except to note that he explores various “dependency relations” in which either the intellect or the will has priority and he concludes that he cannot determine which entity has priority.²

In light of this I would label Plantinga a “concurrentist” with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will. Neither intellect or will has priority.
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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
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As we suggested in our latest post, advocates of the libertarian reconciliation project (LRP) and the compatibilist reconciliation project (CRP) each offer different accounts of divine sovereignty and human freedom.

As we also previously averred, we believe that the CRP holds out the most promise for a successful reconciliation of the prima facie tension that exists between divine sovereignty and human freedom since it is (1) internally consistent (i.e., it forms a self-consistent set), and (2) externally consistent with the biblical data (as this post will labor to demonstrate).

Further, the specific proposals treated as generally representative of the LRP seem to be burdened with insurmountable difficulties (as we will also hope to see in this post).¹
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1. As noted in the previous installment, we must remember that the LRP (as well as the CRP) can be represented by an indefinite number of specific proposals, so the failure of a particular reconciliation attempt does not by itself discredit its project type. We have used the proposals set forth by Cottrell, Marshall, and Pinnock (as cited in the previous post) since we believe them to be generally representative of many of the standard arguments put forth by other advocates of the LRP. Nevertheless, even if their specific arguments can be discredited, this would not fatally damage the LRP since other proposals from this project might be able to overcome the problems noted in this series of posts↩

Throughout history Christians have debated the questions surrounding God’s sovereignty and human freedom and especially how these concepts relate to one another. As David Basinger has succinctly pointed out, Christians have normally wished to affirm both of the following tenets:

The problem of affirming both tenets simultaneously, however, creates a prima facie conflict. If one first assumes T1 (i.e., that humans are causally and therefore morally responsible for certain states of affairs), it is difficult to see how God can bring about the exact state of affairs he desires in every case, and therefore difficult to affirm that he is totally in control of everything in any meaningful sense (as T2 affirms). A similar dilemma occurs in relation to human freedom if one first assumes T2.²
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1. David Basinger, “Divine Control and Human Freedom: Is Middle Knowledge the Answer?,” JETS 36/1 (March 1993): 54.↩
2. Ibid., 54↩