Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 1:35:27 PM
One hundred years after Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening a new evangelist arose by the name of Charles Finney. He hated Calvinism because of its view of the will of man corrupted by sin. He saw Edwards as his opponent in theology.
Edwards’ thesis of God’s sovereignty over the fallen human will is given in his work Freedom of the Will.
Here is Finney’s assessment of Edwards’ book: “Ridiculous! Edwards I revere; his blunders I deplore. I speak thus of this Treatise on the Will, because while it abounds with unwarrantable assumptions, distinctions without difference, and metaphysical subtleties, it has been adopted as the textbook of a multitude of what are called Calvinistic divines for scores of years.” [Finney’s Systematic Theology]
What is Edwards' view of the will, and what were the results of Finney’s efforts to repudiate Edwards’ Calvinism?
Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will
Like the Apostle Paul, Edwards saw all men as enslaved either to sin or to righteousness [Romans 6:16-23]. But slavery to sin does not excuse the sinner for his inability to love and trust God [Romans 8:7-8]. The inability is not physical; it is not something that prevents men from believing when they want to believe. Rather, it is a moral corruption of the heart that renders motives to believe ineffectual. The person thus enslaved to sin cannot believe without the miracle of regeneration, but is nevertheless accountable because of the evil of his heart, which disposes him to be unmoved by reasonable motives in the gospel.
This is Edwards’ argument that the Arminian notion of the will’s ability to determine itself is not a prerequisite of moral accountability.
[credits to John Piper: God's Passion for His Glory]