Journal: Puritan Reformed Journal
Volume: PRJ 02:2 (Jul 2010)
Article: An Uncommon Union: Understanding Jonathan Edwards’s Experimental Calvinism
Author: William M. Schweitzer

PRJ 2:2 (July 2010) p. 208

An Uncommon Union: Understanding Jonathan Edwards’s Experimental Calvinism¹

William M. Schweitzer

How do we describe Jonathan Edwards’s vision for the1church? American church historian Darrell G. Hart gives us a helpful starting point with the term “Experimental Calvinism.”2 Indeed, Edwards wrote a preface to a book by Joseph Bellamy called True Religion Delineated, or, Experimental Religion, As Distinguished from Formality on one Hand, and Enthusiasm on the other, set in a Scriptural and Rational Light.3 Notice how the title is worded: true religion is “experimental,” as distinguished from formality (that is, a religion where external forms are essential but inward experience is not) on the one hand, and enthusiasm (where inward experience is essential but forms are not) on the other. Edwards concurred with Bellamy that religion must comprehend right forms as well as inward experience, and that this biblical faith could be described as “experimental.”4 And Edwards

PRJ 2:2 (July 2010) p. 209

had no problem being called a Calvinist.5 So it seems that Hart is standing on fairly solid ground when he chooses the term “Experimental Calvinism” to describe Edwards’s vision for the church.

If we are agreed on that much, the question then becomes, how do we understand experimental Calvinism? Specifically, we are concerned with how the church transmits the Christian faith to her people. In his 2003 essay and in a 2005 conference paper, Hart implies that Edwards’s vision is preoccupied with inner experience and has little use for the forms that make up the visible church.6 Worse, Edwards’s brand of religion emphasizes dramatic conversions to the point that the church ends up having no place for covenant children brought to faith through catechetical nurture. So, Hart wonders whether Edwards’s “laudable effort to detect signs of regeneration actually betray Reformed teaching on conversion and therefore compromise Calvinism’s doctrine of salvation,” and “undermine a churchly form of Reformed Christianity.”7 Now, it ought to be said from the outset that this is no mere academic exercise. Hart is concerned about some very real pastoral problems no less than for the general state of the contemporary church. The reason why we must take him so seriously on this point is precisely because it is of the greatest importa...