Jonathan Edwards’s Concept Of An Original Ultimate End -- By: Walter J. Schultz

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 56:1 (Mar 2013)
Article: Jonathan Edwards’s Concept Of An Original Ultimate End
Author: Walter J. Schultz


Jonathan Edwards’s Concept Of An Original Ultimate End

Walter J. Schultz*

* Walter Schultz is professor of philosophy at Northwestern College, 3003 Snelling Ave. North, St. Paul, MN 55113.

I. Introductory Comments

In his dissertation, Concerning the END for which GOD created the World,1 we have the final version of Jonathan Edwards’s painstaking labors to state precisely God’s purpose and motive in creating the world.2 In the Introduction Edwards writes, “It may be observed, that when I speak of God’s ultimate end in the creation of the world, in the following discourse, I commonly mean in that highest sense, viz. the original ultimate end.”3 Edwards’s concept of an original ultimate end is crucial to his argumentation and in spite of his insistence that he means original ultimate end, it remains the least explicated feature of his view of God’s end in creation. In these introductory remarks, I describe the background necessary for an appropriate appreciation of the centrality of this concept in Edwards’s argument in End of Creation.

Edwards’s lifelong concern was to experience and then to explain, promote, guide, and defend a view of Christian piety as a “work” of God by which redeemed persons actually experience God’s own trinitarian self-knowledge, love, and joy. He strove to convince pastors, theologians, and philosophers in Great Britain and colonial America that only thereby can created persons truly know God and worship him, delight in his presence, and love each other in genuine fellowship. Thus, Edwards’s primary goal in writing the Two Dissertations was to show, on shared assumptions, that such “true virtue” is God’s ultimate end in creation. It is the content of the promise to Abraham, the culmination of redemption, the realization of the Kingdom of God.

Many of the ideas of God’s end in creation that were proposed before and while Edwards was alive could be classified as ultimate ends in Aristotle’s sense. However, in Edwards’s opinion, given their content they actually tended to promote

a view of religious experience contrary to the gospel. Since before the turn of the eighteenth century New England and Great Britain had been moralizing Christian experience by placing greater stress on natural goodness and ability—contrary to the Bible. It was thought that one could ascertain how to live by reason without revelation and that one could achieve such a life by self-determined choices and self-sus...

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