Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 66:1 (Spring 2004)
Article: Dispositional Peculiarity History, And Edwards’s Evangelistic Appeal To Self-Love
Author: John J. Bombaro

---

WTJ 66:1 (Spring 2004) p. 121

Dispositional Peculiarity History, And
Edwards’s Evangelistic Appeal To Self-Love

John J. Bombaro

[John J. Bombaro is Director at The John Newton International Center for Christian Studies and Adjunct Lecturer, Religion Department, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.]

None but those that do live under the calls of the Gospel shall be saved.. .. That is God’s way and his only way of bringing men to salvation, viz. the Gospel.

—Jonathan Edwards, MS sermon on Matthew 22:14

I. “A Strange, New Edwards”?

Jonathan Edwards categorized himself in rather unambiguous terms. His expressed theological allegiances were so lucid that for well over two centuries after his untimely death one would have been hard pressed to find any notable debate over Edwards’s theological classification. Instead, the contentious issue among schools and scholars regularly fell along lines of “claiming rights”: who more rightly could claim Edwards as their theological patriarch—Princeton or Yale, Old School or New School?1

Edwards unapologetically profiled himself as Christian, confessional, Calvinist. For instance, in a 1750 letter to the Reverend John Erskine (1721–1803) of Kirkintilloch, Scotland, Edwards (recently dismissed from his Northampton ministerial charge and contemplating opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic) disclosed the following admission:

You are pleased, dear Sir, very kindly to ask me whether I could sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, and submit to the Presbyterian form of church government; and to offer to use your influence to procure a call for me to some congregation in Scotland.. .. As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty: and as to the Presbyterian government, I have long been perfectly out of conceit with our unsettled, independent, confused way of church government in this land.2

WTJ 66:1 (Spring 2004) p. 122

Four years later and within the “Preface” to his magisterial A careful and strict Enquiry into The modern prevailing Notions of that Freedom of the Will (1754), Edwards, while disavowing “a dependence on Calvin” for the substance of that treatise, writes: “I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist.”3

Christian, confessional, Calvinist—this is Jonathan Edwards on Jonathan Edwards.

By his own words, works, and reputation, from the time he implicitly e...

visitor : : uid: ()